last condition! In vain we study our
anatomy to see which part we can best spare.

Where is our Portia, to save us with a timely quibble? We've plenty of
Portias. They've recited their heads off--"The quality of mercy is not
strained." But the old Shylock of the proletariat persists. He pops up
again, and says, "All right, I can't have my pound of flesh with the
blood. But then you can't keep my pound of flesh with your blood--you
owe it to me. It is your business to deliver the goods. Deliver it
then--with or without blood--deliver it." The Portia scratches her head,
and thinks again.

What's the solution? There is no solution. But still there is a choice.
There's a choice between a mess and a tragedy. If Plebs and Bully hang
on one to each end of the bone, and pull for grim life, they will
at last tear the bone to atoms: in short, destroy the whole material
substance of life, and so perish by accident, no better than a frog
under the wheel of destiny. That may be a disaster, but it is only a
mess for all that.

On the other hand, if they have a fight to fight they might really drop
the bone. Instead of wrangling the bone to bits they might really go
straight for one another. They are like hostile parties on board a ship,
who both proceed to scuttle the ship so as to sink the other party. Down
goes the ship, with all the bally lot on board. A few survivors swim and
squeal among the bubbles--and then silence.

It is too much to suppose that the combatants will ever drop the
obvious old bone. But it is not too much to imagine that some men might
acknowledge the bone to be merely a pretext, and hollow _casus belli_.
If we really could know what we were fighting for, if we if we could
deeply believe in what we were fighting for, then the struggle might
have dignity, beauty, satisfaction for us. If it were a profound
struggle for something that was coming to life in us, a struggle that
we were convinced would bring us to a new freedom, a new life, then it
would be a creative activity, a creative activity in which death is a
climax in the progression towards new being. And this is tragedy.

Therefore, if we could but comprehend or feel the tragedy in the great
Labour struggle, the intrinsic tragedy of having to pass through death
to birth, our souls would still know some happiness, the very happiness
of creative suffering. Instead of which we pile accident on accident,
we tear the fabric of our existence fibre by fibre,