As a result of the attention excited by these or by certain of these books, I was in the year 1907 invited to visit America and deliver a series of addresses on the Socialist propaganda of the day. These addresses were presently rewritten and published in a volume called _A Critical Examination of Socialism_.
Between that time and the outbreak of the recent war I played an active part, together with other persons, in devising and setting on foot certain schemes of anti-Socialist propaganda in this country. Most of my own efforts I devoted to the collection and promulgation of sound social statistics, especially those relating to the current distribution of wealth, and I may here mention, without even suggesting a name, that I discussed the importance of such statistics with a leading Conservative statesman, who, expressing his sympathy with my views, added at the same time that, so far as the constitution of his own mind was concerned, they were not temperamentally his own. "To me," he said, "columns of figures are merely so many clouds." I answered, "That may be; but they are clouds which, when taken together, make not clouds, but lightning."
Anyhow, by the outbreak of war these schemes were suspended, and changed conditions may now make methods other than those which seemed then appropriate necessary. But, as for myself, the first four years of war-time I devoted entirely to the production of a new volume, _The Limits of Pure Democracy_, of which a French translation is being issued, and which may, I hope, prove useful to sober conservatives of more than one school and country, as it aims at establishing a formula acceptable, so far as it goes, to persons who are at present adversaries.
In addition to the works here mentioned, two volumes have been published of _Collected Essays_, on which certain of the works just mentioned are based. I have further published, besides my little book on Cyprus, two short volumes of verse, and a poem of which I shall speak presently, called _Lucretius on Life and Death_. All these works indicate, if taken together, the nature of the fallacies--intellectual, religious, and social--which have in succession provoked them, which have not yet exhausted themselves, and which it has been the ambition of the writer to discredit or modify.