SHOOTING NIAGARA 225

"My old man said, Follow the van

And don't dilly dally on the way!

Off went the cart with the home packed in it,

I walked behind with my old cock linnet.

But I dillied and dallied, dallied and dillied,

Lost the van and don't know where to roam.

I stopped on the way to have the old half-quartern,

And I can't find my way home."

• ••••*.•
It was to the people whose life this vulgar, proud and humane
'art represented that the Socialist offered his collectivist remedy.
He assumed, not without the justification of logic, that the
English working man was already a proletarian slave and that
he would be only too willing to band himself as a nameless
comrade in the great army of his class against the rich and
privileged. But this was not so. The downtrodden wage-slave
did not think of himself as such but as the rightful inheritor—
as by ancestry he was—of a free tradition of transmitted privilege.
He only wanted to get back his own: to be the great gentleman
he knew himself to be, enjoying, generous and carefree. All the
while that the socialist propagandist was telling him of the pro-
letarian heaven, he was dreaming of the day when a rich unknown
cousin would die in Australia or the horses he so hopefully and
religiously backed each week would bring him a fortune and he
would be able to have a house and a garden of his own and go to
race meetings and cricket matches every day instead of working
with his fellow proletarians in the factory.

Thus it came about that the first missionaries of the new
socialist religion were treated with derision by the rough, tin-
believing multitude. They were denounced as atheists, anarchists
and republicans, as liars and quacks who offered " sum'at for noth-
ing." Their meetings were frequently broken up amid rude
noises. In those days it was the Socialists who were heckled by
the local toughs and practical jokers, not the Tories. England
was so accustomed to being'governed by well-spoken gentlemen
in top hats that the spectacle of an avowed Socialist going down"
• to the House of Commons in a check cap with a brass band
.blaring at his side profoundly shocked many humble men and
women. Working men were at first exceedingly suspicious of
members of their own class who sought to enter Parliament as'
if they were toffs and were always ready to listen to any