mulating overhead.

As they remained at the window looking out over this scene for a few
minutes after the train had passed out of sight, it seemed to Owen that
the gathering darkness was as a curtain that concealed from view the
Infamy existing beyond. In every country, myriads of armed men waiting
for their masters to give them the signal to fall upon and rend each
other like wild beasts. All around was a state of dreadful anarchy;
abundant riches, luxury, vice, hypocrisy, poverty, starvation, and
crime. Men literally fighting with each other for the privilege of
working for their bread, and little children crying with hunger and
cold and slowly perishing of want.

The gloomy shadows enshrouding the streets, concealing for the time
their grey and mournful air of poverty and hidden suffering, and the
black masses of cloud gathering so menacingly in the tempestuous sky,
seemed typical of the Nemesis which was overtaking the Capitalist
System. That atrocious system which, having attained to the fullest
measure of detestable injustice and cruelty, was now fast crumbling
into ruin, inevitably doomed to be overwhelmed because it was all so
wicked and abominable, inevitably doomed to sink under the blight and
curse of senseless and unprofitable selfishness out of existence for
ever, its memory universally execrated and abhorred.

But from these ruins was surely growing the glorious fabric of the
Co-operative Commonwealth. Mankind, awaking from the long night of
bondage and mourning and arising from the dust wherein they had lain
prone so long, were at last looking upward to the light that was riving
asunder and dissolving the dark clouds which had so long concealed from
them the face of heaven. The light that will shine upon the world wide
Fatherland and illumine the gilded domes and glittering pinnacles of
the beautiful cities of the future, where men shall dwell together in
true brotherhood and goodwill and joy. The Golden Light that will be
diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun
of Socialism.

Appendix

Mugsborough

Mugsborough was a town of about eighty thousand inhabitants, about two
hundred miles from London. It was built in a verdant valley. Looking
west, north or east from the vicinity of the fountain on the Grand
Parade in the centre of the town, one saw a succession of pine-clad
hills. To the south, as far as the eye could see, stretched a vast,
cultivated pla