as conspicuous in English Socialism as Bebel is in German Socialism;
but do you suppose that the German Social-Democrats tolerate me? Not
a bit of it. I have begged again and again to be taken to the bosom
of my German comrades. I have pleaded that the Super-Proletarians
of all lands should unite. I have pointed out that the German
Social-Democratic party has done nothing at its Congresses for the
last ten years except the things I told them to do ten years before,
and that its path is white with the bones of the Socialist
superstitions I and my fellow Fabians have slain. Useless. They do
not care a rap whether I am a Socialist or not. All they want to
know is; Am I orthodox? Am I correct in my revolutionary views? Am
I reverent to the revolutionary authorities? Because I am a genuine
free-thinker they look at me as a policeman looks at a midnight
prowler or as a Berlin bourgeois looks at a suspicious foreigner.
They ask "Do you believe that Marx was omniscient and infallible;
that Engels was his prophet; that Bebel and Singer are his inspired
apostles; and that Das Kapital is the Bible?" Hastening in my
innocence to clear myself of what I regard as an accusation of
credulity and ignorance, I assure them earnestly that I know ten
times as much of economics and a hundred times as much of practical
administration as Marx did; that I knew Engels personally and rather
liked him as a witty and amiable old 1848 veteran who despised
modern Socialism; that I regard Bebel and Singer as men of like
passions with myself, but considerably less advanced; and that I
read Das Kapital in the year 1882 or thereabouts, and still consider
it one of the most important books of the nineteenth century because
of its power of changing the minds of those who read it, in spite of
its unsound capitalist economics, its parade of quotations from
books which the author had either not read or not understood, its
affectation of algebraic formulas, and its general attempt to