Any competent writer can
collect the facts about Municipal Drink Trade, or Afforestation, or Poor
Law Reform: many can explain an Act of Parliament in simple language:
but only one here and there can write what others care to read on the
principles of Socialism and the broad aspects of its propaganda. If our
list of tracts be examined it will be found that the great majority of
the "general" tracts have been written by Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw.
A few other writers have contributed general tracts from a special
standpoint, such as those on Christian Socialism. When we have mentioned
reprinted papers by William Morris and Sir Oliver Lodge, and a tract by
Sidney Ball, the list is virtually complete. Mr. Wells himself only
contributed to us his paper "This Misery of Boots," and his appeal to
the rank and file yielded nothing at all. Of course there are plenty of
people as innocent in this respect as Mr. Wells was at that period
referred to. Hardly a month has passed in the last twenty years without
somebody, usually from the remote provinces, sending up a paper on
Socialism, which he is willing to allow the Society to publish on
reasonable terms. But only once have we thus found an unknown author
whose work, on a special subject, we could publish, and he resigned a
year or two later because we were compelled to reject a second tract
which he wrote for us.
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