Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/537

128 proselytizing and patching up went on unceasingly. In January "he can talk about little else, and will brook no opposition." For a time there was almost a breach between him and several of his older friends.

"I was rather disconcerted," one of them has recorded, "when I found that an honest objection to Bulgarian atrocities had been held to be one and the same thing as sympathy with Karl Marx, and that Morris took it for granted that I should be ready for enrolment." Just at present Morris had quite lost his capacity for good-humoured argument. "I have a dim recollection," says Mr. William De Morgan, "of a discussion on Socialism which ended in a scheme for the complete reconstruction of society exactly as it is now, so as to meet the views of both revolutionaries and Conservatives: however, this was in the earlier days of Socialism—as he got more engrossed in the subject, this sort of chat became less and less possible."

The first number of the weekly paper of the Democratic Federation, "Justice: the Organ of the Social Democracy," appeared on the 9th of January. Besides practically paying out of his own pocket for the weekly deficit in its balance sheet, Morris contributed articles to one-half of the numbers which appeared up to the end of December. These contributions included three more of the "Chants for Socialists," and one brief article on that year's exhibition of the Royal Academy, expanded by him in a longer paper which was published in the July number of the secularist magazine "To-day." Like the single piece of literary criticism he had printed twenty-eight years earlier, this single piece of art criticism is more interesting as a fragment of unstudied autobiography than from its remarks on the special works singled out for praise or blame. A few sentences from it are