The air is charged with a subtle potency, the product of the ...

The air is charged with a subtle potency, the product of the same ferment, which bred by turn the Christian Socialists and the Pre-Raphaelites, and took body in the republicanism of Swinburne, the economics of Ruskin, the workshops and romances of Morris. But this potency is controlled now by the exacter methods, the more rigorous scrutiny of evidence, which science was imposing upon all inquiry, and the ferment is charged with foreign elements ; a strong infusion of Sean Alan, a dash of Mazzini, a dash of Tolstoy, not much Anarchism, rather more Internationalism, and a gradually solidifying contribution from Engels and Marx.

In that hospitable, lightly-policed London, among whose most respectable citizens were Russian Nihilists and Paris Communards, all theories might be propounded, and all would have to run into the English mould or else evaporate in air. Politically old Radicalism was not far from its goal of universal suffrage, and the final identification of rulers and ruled.

So near was it indeed that the rest might be taken for granted, and the younger Radical mind was thinking of another course and another objective.

In politics there is no Utilitarian stopping place short of pure democracy. In economic life is the identification of rulers and ruled conceivable at any point short of pure collectivism? Are not the organs, in outline, there, in Whitehall, in the Counties and County Boroughs? Of the two lions in the way, one was dead, the other stricken.