Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/184

 180 My belief in the possibility of an intellectual life for those who do the hardest labour has been greatly strengthened in recent years by my contact with the Adult School and similar movements. To find, Sunday morning after Sunday morning, crowds of men who have been working laboriously for long hours in factories at exhausting drudgery all through the week, appearing carefully dressed at hours when most people in better circumstances are only getting up or have got no further than the commencement of breakfast, and to observe the intellectual keenness which these men show for subjects of serious import, compel one to think on somewhat utopian lines of what might be under better circumstances. And when, in addition to that, one also discovers that these factory workers are tenants of some near-by allotment, where they grow excellent kitchen produce and cultivate beautiful flowers for the æsthetic enjoyment of the work, one's optimism for the future is increased, and one’s assurance that an intellectual response will be made to the changes which Socialism proposes becomes fixed on a rock.

I now come to my matter of practical detail. If there is any citizen of the Socialist state who has drawn out the sympathies of the whole body of Socialist critics more than any other, it is the poet. His case seems to have weighed on the minds of most of our critics. How is he to be discovered? How is he to be published? How is he to make a living? The press is to be in the hands of the