the water
begins to glitter in the sun, and the gold to reflect its glory. They
break into ecstatic worship of their treasure; and though they know the
parable of Klondyke quite well, they have no fear that the gold will be
wrenched away by the dwarf, since it will yield to no one who has not
forsworn love for it, and it is in pursuit of love that he has come to
them. They forget that they have poisoned that desire in him by their
mockery and denial of it, and that he now knows that life will give him
nothing that he cannot wrest from it by the Plutonic power. It is just
as if some poor, rough, vulgar, coarse fellow were to offer to take his
part in aristocratic society, and be snubbed into the knowledge that
only as a millionaire could he ever hope to bring that society to his
feet and buy himself a beautiful and refined wife. His choice is forced
on him. He forswears love as thousands of us forswear it every day; and
in a moment the gold is in his grasp, and he disappears in the depths,
leaving the water-fairies vainly screaming "Stop thief!" whilst the
river seems to plunge into darkness and sink from us as we rise to the
cloud regions above.

And now, what forces are there in the world to resist Alberic, our
dwarf, in his new character of sworn plutocrat? He is soon at
work wielding the power of the gold. For his gain, hordes of his
fellow-creatures are thenceforth condemned to slave miserably,
overground and underground, lashed to their work by the invisible whip
of starvation. They never see him, any more than the victims of our
"dangerous trades" ever see the shareholders whose power is nevertheless
everywhere, driving them to destruction. The very wealth they create
with their labor becomes an additional force to impoverish them; for as
fast as they make it it slips from their hands into the hands of their
master, and makes him mightier than ever. You can see the process for
yourself in every civilized country today, where millions of people toil
in want and disease to heap up more wealth for our Alberics, laying up
nothing for themselves, except sometimes horrible and agonizing disease
and the certainty of premature death. All this part of the story is
frightfully real, frightfully present, frightfully modern; and its
effects on our social life are so ghastly and ruinous that we no longer
know enough of happiness to be discomposed by it. It is only the
poet, with his vision of what life might be, to whom these