Page:Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome - William Morris and Ernest Belfort Bax (1909).djvu/17

Rh refined classes of our Society, which is born of the misery necessary to their very existence. How do people note eagerly, like Arthur Gordon Pym and his luckless fellows, the beautiful hope of the softening of life by the cultivation of good feeling, kindness, and gratitude between rich and poor, with its external manifestations; its missionary enterprises at home and abroad—hospitals, churches, refuges, and the like; its hard-working clergy dwelling amidst the wretched homes of those whose souls they are saving; its elegant and enthusiastic ladies sometimes visiting them; its dignified, cultivated gentlemen from the universities spreading the influences of a refined home in every dull half-starved parish in England; the thoughtful series of lectures on that virtue of thrift which the poor can scarcely fail to practise even unpreached to; its increasing sense of the value of moral purity among those whose surroundings forbid them to understand even the meaning of physical purity; its scent of indecency in Literature and Art, which would prevent the publication of any book written out of England or before