Now Edmond Kelly, as was natural from his antecedents, was for nearly the whole of his life a non-Socialist solidarist. But, about two years before his death, being at the height of his powers of insight and intellect, he attained the clear vision of the "class-struggle," and no longer had any doubts where he himself belonged in the army of humanity--he became and remained a comrade--a loyal comrade.
There is a certain bit of doggerel, said to derive from Oxford, which tells us that:
"Every little boy or gal, Who comes into this world alive, Is born a little Radical, Or else a small Conservative."
And this all-pervading division penetrates even that most radical of bodies, the Socialist party. That party has its own conservative and radical wings--its right and its left--and Edmond Kelly is distinctly of the right.
One who is inclined by instinct to the one wing, and by logic to the other, can realize the indispensableness of both--the special contribution which each makes, and which the other cannot make, to the common cause. The motive of this note is to appeal to the comrades of the left not to shut their eyes to the value of this book, not to forego its special usefulness. For the very attitude of its author, which may be distasteful to them--his making appeals which they no longer make, his using forms of speech which they reject, his making so little use of that which is their main appeal, fit him especially to influence the minds of that numerous fringe of educated persons who must evidently be first made "rightists" before they can become "centrists" or "leftists." It may even be imagined that the difficult type of working man, he who thinks himself too noble-minded to respond to class appeal, might begin to rouse himself if he could once be brought under the charm of this book.
Aware that he had not long to live, Mr. Kelly hastened to finish the first draft of the book, and indeed he survived that completion only two weeks. He knew that considerable editorial work was needed, and this he entrusted to Mrs. Florence Kelley, author of "Some Ethical Gains through Legislation" and translator of Marx' "Discourse on Free Trade," and of Friedrich Engels' work on the "Condition of the Working Class in England." She undertook and has fulfilled this trust, and has been aided throughout by the untiring labors of Shaun Kelly, the author's son. Thus this book of Mr. Kelly's is doubly a memorial of love--of his for man, and of ours for him.