hesitate sometimes and doubt that
all men are worthy of the better things of life, the coalheaver as well
as the banker and artist? Even I hesitate sometimes, when I see the
coarseness and ignorance of these poor plodders of earth, and when I
think of all the really great things that slavery has accomplished. But
who knows how much greater things might be, if done freely by free men?
When I remember that these poor plodders have never had a chance, I
relent and feel so sorry and so hopeless. How often Terry and I have
walked along the boulevards, admiring the beautiful homes of the rich.
Oh, it used to make me wild! I felt that I belonged to humanity, and yet
I could only enter these beautiful homes as a servant, an object of
contempt--an object of contempt supposed, moreover, to have morals, and
religion, too!"

Of "class consciousness," Terry wrote: "Class feeling has always been a
deep problem to me: it emanates from profound depths. This reflection
concerns you. Many of your 'labour' friends here seem to regret that
there were many things they could not tell you; not that they had any
conscious lack of faith in you as an individual; indeed, they had great
faith in you as a person. Their distrust of you was a class distrust;
they dreaded to betray the interests of their class. They felt a
fundamental antagonism, not to you as an individual, but to you as a
member of your class. From their Social Sinai they enunciate the
eleventh commandment, 'Thou shalt not be a Scab!', and the other ten
commandments do not seem to them so important. But you, they think,
cannot feel this commandment as they do, so passionately, so fully. To
them, it is the keynote of solidarity; to you, partly at least, a
principle of division, of separation.

"No wonder our class--the thinkers among them--rejects the morality of
your class--property morality, and the rest meant only to make property
morality as strong as a law of God. I made at one time the fatal mistake
of the many simple labourers who are organically honest. I spent most of
my best life in seeking a solution of our hard lot from those above me.
After a loss of many feathers and some brave plumage, but no down, I
must in all humility beat my way back to the traditional lost ideals of
our organically incorporated class.... Perhaps the most conscienceless
class who seek to solve the insoluble is the 'cultured' class. But most
of them seem to me like artistic undertakers officiating