ir
hearts there is a determination that they and their children shall
receive the same educational advantages, the same right to air and light
and decent amusement, as the children of the wealthy. Because I am poor,
they say to themselves, why should I therefore have to inhabit a home
unfit for decent habitation, receive education utterly useless from every
practical point of view--be forced to live in surroundings which
absolutely invite degradation of both mind and body? There will always
be poverty, but there ought never to be indecent poverty. Better
education; better housing; better chances for healthy recreation--these
are the things for which the masses are clamouring. Why is it wrong for
a workman who has made money during the war to buy a piano--and to hear
people talk that seems to be one of their most dastardly crimes--when it
is quite all right for his employer, who has made more money out of the
war, to pay five pounds for one good dinner, or a night's "jazzing"?

_Sweeping Assertions from Particular Instances_

And this mention of the piano-crime among the munition-makers brings me
to another fact--how utterly impossible it is for the majority of people
to judge any big scheme without having regard to the particular instances
which threaten its success. Because some working people are so utterly
bestial that they are unfit to live in decent homes--so the majority of
poor people are unworthy of better surroundings. You might just as well
judge the ruling classes by the few units who advertise their own
extravagant tom-fooleries! In all questions of reform you have to work,
as it were, up to the vision of an ideal. The real, however
disappointing at the outset, will eventually reach the higher plane--of
that I am certain. And in no question am I more certain of this than in
the question of the working classes. The heart of democracy, as I said
before, is absolutely in the right place; only its "head" is as yet
undeveloped. Its mental "view" is restricted--and no wonder! Everything
that has so far been done has helped to restrict that view. This war has
let more "light" into the "soul" of democracy than all the national
so-called education which has ever been devised and made compulsory.
Confiscation of property and all those other tom-fool cries are but the
screams of a handful of silly Bolsheviks. There is no echo in the heart
of the real labouring men and women. If they applaud it, it