William Morris, of whom we have already spoken, may be said to
introduce the Socialists, but rather in a social sense than a
philosophical. He was their friend, and in a sort of political way,
their father; but he was not their founder, for he would not have
believed a word of what they ultimately came to say. Nor is this the
conventional notion of the old man not keeping pace with the audacity of
the young. Morris would have been disgusted not with the wildness, but
the tameness of our tidy Fabians. He was not a Socialist, but he was a
Revolutionist; he didn't know much more about what he was; but he knew
that. In this way, being a full-blooded fellow, he rather repeats the
genial sulkiness of Dickens. And if we take this fact about him first,
we shall find it a key to the whole movement of this time. For the one
dominating truth which overshadows everything else at this point is a
political and economic one. The Industrial System, run by a small class
of Capitalists on a theory of competitive contract, had been quite
honestly established by the early Victorians and was one of the primary
beliefs of Victorianism. The Industrial System, so run, had become
another name for hell. By Morris's time and ever since, England has been
divided into three classes: Knaves, Fools, and Revolutionists.

History is full of forgotten controversies; and those who speak of
Socialism now have nearly all forgotten that for some time it was an
almost equal fight between Socialism and Anarchism for the leadership of
the exodus from Capitalism. It is here that Herbert Spencer comes in
logically, though not chronologically; also that much more interesting
man, Auberon Herbert. Spencer has no special place as a man of letters;
and a vastly exaggerated place as a philosopher. His real importance was
that he was very nearly an Anarchist. The indefinable greatness there is
about him after all, in spite of the silliest and smuggest limitations,