Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/517

108 Under the pressure of opposition which, at Manchester and elsewhere, he was now beginning to feel, a hardening of his tone about this time begins to be perceptible. "I am tired of being mealy-mouthed," he breaks out in a letter. In April he was lecturing regularly, "preaching my sermon" as he calls it, in different parts of London, and becoming more plain-spoken in each fresh draft of his message. In May he was put, rather against his will, on the executive of the Democratic Federation; "so I am in for more work. However I don't like belonging to a body without knowing what they are doing. Without feeling very sanguine about their doings, "they seem certainly to mean something; money is chiefly lacking, as usual."

To meet this lack of money among a small and struggling group of enthusiasts, the drain on his own resources was already heavy, and became heavier as time went on. "You have no revolution on hand on which to spend your money," he wrote to Ellis in the same week. "By the way," he adds, suddenly turning to another and an earlier interest, "the May-fly does not visit Wandle: they are eating the alder and the cocktail now. Wardle got a fish (not in our water) on Monday evening, a 2 lb., I heard." Himself now he found no time for fishing or for any relaxation. The absorption of his time by his new work amounted to two full working-days, besides odd evenings, out of every week. "I haven't had two consecutive hours to call my own since I saw you three weeks ago," he writes to Mrs. Burne-Jones later in the summer; "my time has been a mere heap of chopped straw."

So far as concerns his attitude at this point towards politics and the ideas of that middle class which he had not yet renounced, two long and clearly reasoned