al fighting with weapons?" said I, "or the strikes and
lock-outs and starvation of which we have heard?"

"Both, both," he said. "As a matter of fact, the history of the terrible
period of transition from commercial slavery to freedom may thus be
summarised. When the hope of realising a communal condition of life for
all men arose, quite late in the nineteenth century, the power of the
middle classes, the then tyrants of society, was so enormous and
crushing, that to almost all men, even those who had, you may say despite
themselves, despite their reason and judgment, conceived such hopes, it
seemed a dream. So much was this the case that some of those more
enlightened men who were then called Socialists, although they well knew,
and even stated in public, that the only reasonable condition of Society
was that of pure Communism (such as you now see around you), yet shrunk
from what seemed to them the barren task of preaching the realisation of
a happy dream. Looking back now, we can see that the great motive-power
of the change was a longing for freedom and equality, akin if you please
to the unreasonable passion of the lover; a sickness of heart that
rejected with loathing the aimless solitary life of the well-to-do
educated man of that time: phrases, my dear friend, which have lost their
meaning to us of the present day; so far removed we are from the dreadful
facts which they represent.

"Well, these men, though conscious of this feeling, had no faith in it,
as a means of bringing about the change. Nor was that wonderful: for
looking around them they saw the huge mass of the oppressed classes too
much burdened with the misery of their lives, and too much overwhelmed by
the selfishness of misery, to be able to form a conception of any escape
from it except by the ordinary way prescribed by the system of slavery
under which they lived; which was nothing more than a remote chance of
climbing out of the oppressed into the oppressing class.

"Therefore, though they knew that the only reasonable aim for those who
would better the world was a condition of equality; in their impatience
and despair they managed to convince themselves that if they could by
hook or by crook get the machinery of production and the management of
property so altered that the 'lower classes' (so the horrible word ran)
might have their slavery somewhat ameliorated, they would be ready to fit
into this machinery, and would use it for bettering