Radicalism will melt into Whiggery--are doing so now--and Socialism
has got to absorb all that is not Whig in Radicalism.

Then comes the question, What is the policy of Socialism? If Toryism
and Democracy are only nebulous masses of opposition to the solid
centre of Whiggery, what can we call Socialism?

Well, at present, in England at least, Socialism is not a party, but
a sect. That is sometimes brought against it as a taunt; but I am
not dismayed by it; for I can conceive of a sect--nay, I have heard
of one--becoming a very formidable power, and becoming so by dint of
its long remaining a sect. So I think it is quite possible that
Socialism will remain a sect till the very eve of the last stroke
that completes the revolution, after which it will melt into the new
Society. And is it not sects, bodies of definite, uncompromising
principles, that lead us into revolutions? Was it not so in the
Cromwellian times? Nay, have not the Fenian sect, even in our own
days, made Home Rule possible? They may give birth to parties,
though not parties themselves. And what should a sect like we are
have to do in the parliamentary struggle--we who have an ideal to
keep always before ourselves and others, and who cannot accept
compromise; who can see nothing that can give us rest for a minute
save the emancipation of labour, which will be brought about by the
workers gaining possession of all the means of the fructification of
labour; and who, even when that is gained, shall have pure Communism
ahead to strive for?

What are we to do, then? Stand by and look on? Not exactly. Yet we
may look on other people doing their work while we do ours. They are
already beginning, as I have said, to stumble about with attempts at