Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/80

68 shape of which they conceive it—and their cure is worse than the disease. The instinct of self-preservation in humanity may be trusted to save us from the suicide of either a red-rampant State Socialism or unrestricted competition; but there is something, as I take it, in which this instinct cannot be trusted, and that is universal and triumphant ignorance, and after ignorance, corruption and sloth.'

He put down his cigarette in the little tray on the smoking-table at his side.

'I have told you,' he said, 'that when I had been six months in the London slums, I had become simply an out-and-out Socialist and Labour man. Socialism was the ideal; Labour organisation, first in unions and then as a political party, the practical means at hand with which to forward the realisation of this ideal. It was not pity alone for the suffering of those people that produced this in me. I knew that in some respects their life was little more piteous than that of the lower and even of the central middle-class above them. In other respects I knew that the masses were absolutely better off. Their existence, if they have health and strength, is often less hopelessly dull and soullessly corrupt. They have at least blood in their veins, not mud, and their life is the wild life of animals, with wild animal pleasures and pains; not the slow corroding cark and care and secret viciousness which