scientific reform that will really guarantee economic security to all.
It may really purge itself of the accidental maladies of anarchy and
famine; and continue as a machine, but at least as a comparatively clean
and humanely shielded machine; at any rate no longer as a man-eating
machine. Capitalism may clear itself of its worst corruptions by such
reform as is open to it; by creating humane and healthy conditions for
labour, and setting the labouring classes to work under a lucid and
recognised law. It may make Pittsburg one vast model factory for all who
will model themselves upon factories; and may give to all men and women
in its employment a clear social status in which they can be contented
and secure. And on the day when that social security is established for
the masses, when industrial capitalism has achieved this larger and more
logical organisation and found peace at last, a strange and shadowy and
ironic triumph, like an abstract apology, will surely hover over all
those graves in the Wilderness where lay the bones of so many gallant
gentlemen; men who had also from their youth known and upheld such a
social stratification, who had the courage to call a spade a spade and a
slave a slave.

_A New Martin Chuzzlewit_

The aim of this book, if it has one, is to suggest this thesis; that the
very worst way of helping Anglo-American friendship is to be an
Anglo-American. There is only one thing lower, of course, which is being
an Anglo-Saxon. It is lower, because at least Englishmen do exist and
Americans do exist; and it may be possible, though repulsive, to imagine
an American and an Englishman in some way blended together. But if
Angles and Saxons ever did exist, they are all fortunately dead now; and
the wildest imagination cannot form the weakest idea of what sort of
monster would be made by mixing one with the other. But my thesis is
that the whole hope, and the only hope, lies not in mixing two things
together, but rather in cutting them very sharply asunder. That is the
only way in which two things can succeed sufficiently in getting outside
each other to appreciate and admire each other. So long as they are
different and yet supposed to be the same, there can be nothing but a
divided mind and a staggering balance. It may be that in the first
twilight of time man and woman walked about as one quadruped. But if
they did, I am sure it was a quadruped that reared and bucked and kicked
up its heels.