Philistia

It was Sunday evening and on Sundays Max Schurz the chief of the London Socialists always held his weekly receptions. That night his cosmopolitan refugee friends were all at liberty; his French disciples could pour in from the little lanes and courts in Soho where since the Commune they had plied their peaceful trades as engravers picture-framers artists'-colourmen models pointers and so forth-for most of them were hangers-on in one way or another of the artistic world; his German adherents could stroll round pipe in mouth from their printing-houses their ham-and-beef shops or their naturalists' chambers where they stuffed birds or set up exotic butterflies in little cabinets-for most of them were more or less literary or scientific in their pursuits; and his few English sympathisers chiefly dissatisfied philosophical Radicals of the upper classes could drop in casually for a chat and a smoke on their way home from the churches to which they had been dutifully escorting their un-emancipated wives and sisters. Max Schurz kept open house for all on Sunday evenings and there was not a drawing-room in London better filled than his with the very advanced and not undistinguished set who alone had the much-prized entree of his exclusive salon.