offered Massachusetts, which already had a large proportion of
Socialists in its population, as a colony which would be
tolerated as definitely socialistic. Christians would be warned
that the new system would, if the Powers agreed, be on
definitely non-Catholic lines, and that the immigration laws
would be in future suspended with regard to Massachusetts. There
were, of course, innumerable details still to be worked out, but
by the end of February the understanding was established, and
from every European country emigrant parties were arranged.

There was something almost attractive about the scheme to the
popular mind. It had been talked of for years before--this
arrangement by which the Socialists should have an opportunity of
working out once more those old exploded democratic ideas to
which they still clung so pathetically. Every child knew, of
course, how fifty years before the experiment had been made in
various places, and how appalling tyranny had been the
result--tyranny, that is, over those who, in the Socialist
communities, still held to Individualism. But what would happen,
the world indulgently wondered, in a community where there were
no Individualists? One of two things certainly would happen.
Either the scheme would work and every democrat be satisfied, or
the theory would be reduced to a practical absurdity, and the
poison would be expelled for ever from the world's system.
Besides, if this asylum were once definitely secured and
guaranteed by the assent of the Powers, the new heresy laws that
were already coming to birth in Germany, that were already
enforced with considerable vigour in the Latin countries, and
were (it was known) being prepared and adapted for England--these
could now go forward and be applied universally, without any fear