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ÆT. 49] than it was either before or since. It is a curious sign of his loneliness and self-absorption at this time, that no two of his friends (so far as I am able to ascertain) agree in their view of the steps by which he became a convinced Socialist and the main influences—whether men or events or books—that served to shape his course at this time precisely in the way it took. His own letters of the time, so far as they exist, give little clue to any changes which were going on in his mind. The account which he himself gave some ten years later is no doubt abstractly accurate. "A brief period of political Radicalism," he then wrote, "during which I saw my ideal clear enough, but had no hope of any realization of it, came to an end some months before I joined the Democratic Federation, and the meaning of my joining that body was, that I had conceived a hope of the realization of that ideal." But for the growth of this hope no one cause can be assigned. He once said to Mr. G.B. Shaw that he had been converted to Socialism by Mill, in his posthumously published papers analyzing the system of Fourier, in which he "clearly gave the verdict against the evidence." In the article already quoted, Morris alludes to these papers, and says that they put the finishing touch to his conversion. It may be doubted whether even this modified statement is not an unconscious over-statement, and whether Morris does not here mix up the causes of his conversion with the reasons by which that conversion could be justified. For some considerable time after he became a professed Socialist, he worked hard at the task of proving his belief. "I put some conscience into trying to learn the economical side of Socialism, and even tackled Marx, though I suffered agonies of confusion of the brain over reading the economics of that work." But the belief,