Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/527

118 "Meantime it is obvious that the support to be looked for for constructive Socialism from the working classes at present is nought. Who can wonder, as things now are, when the lower classes are really lower? Of vague discontent and a spirit of revenge for the degradation in which they are kept there is plenty I think, but that seems all. What we want is real leaders themselves working men, and content to be so till classes are abolished. But you see when a man has gifts for that kind of thing he finds himself tending to rise out of his class before he has begun to think of class politics as a matter of principle, and too often he is just simply 'got at' by the governing classes, not formally, but by circumstances I mean. Education is the word doubtless; but then in comes the commercial system and defends itself against that in a terrible unconscious way with the struggle for bread, and lack of leisure, and squalid housing—and there we go, round and round the circle still."

It was not only the business of moderating and patching up that was now beginning, but the equally endless task of explaining to a quite light-hearted and careless world distinctions which perpetually became more crucial as their scope was narrowed, but which those beyond the circle could never be induced to see as distinctions at all. "The manifesto spoken of in to-day's Daily News," he wearily writes, "is not ours; nor is it Social Democratic, which is what we are, but Anarchist. We consider them dangerous; for you see they have no programme but destruction, whereas we are reconstructive. People in general are quite ignorant of the whole matter."

At the beginning of September he wrote the first of those hymns of the new movement which were issued under the title of "Chants for Socialists." The fine