"Singing songs unbidden
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not."


That, too, is the reason that impels me to embody such views as
these in romantic fiction, not in deliberate treatises. "Why sow
your ideas broadcast," many honest critics say, "in novels where
mere boys and girls can read them? Why not formulate them in
serious and argumentative books, where wise men alone will come
across them?" The answer is, because wise men are wise already: it
is the boys and girls of a community who stand most in need of
suggestion and instruction. Women, in particular, are the chief
readers of fiction; and it is women whom one mainly desires to
arouse to interest in profound problems by the aid of this vehicle.
Especially should one arouse them to such living interest while
they are still young and plastic, before they have crystallised and
hardened into the conventional marionettes of polite society. Make
them think while they are young: make them feel while they are
sensitive: it is then alone that they will think and feel, if ever.
I will venture, indeed, to enforce my views on this subject by a
little apologue which I have somewhere read, or heard,--or
invented.

A Revolutionist desired to issue an Election Address to the Working
Men of Bermondsey. The Rector of the Parish saw it at the
printer's, and came to him, much perturbed. "Why write it in
English?" he asked. "It will only inflame the minds of the lower
orders. Why not allow me to translate it into Ciceronian Latin?