Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/529

120 and least, down to the smallest who can screw out money from standing by to see another man working for him.

"The one thing I want you to be clear about is that I cannot help acting in the matter, and associating myself with any body which has the root of the matter; and you know, and it may ease your kind heart respecting me, that those who are in the thick of it, and trying to do something, are not likely to feel so much of the hope deferred which hangs about the cause as onlookers do."

In the same spirit, though from a somewhat different position, and in a rather more militant tone, he wrote about the same time to Mr. Horsfall:

"I have long felt sure that commercialism must be attacked at the root before we can be on the road for those improvements in life which you and I so much desire. A society which is founded on the system of compelling all well-to-do people to live on making the greatest possible profit out of the labour of others, must be wrong. For it means the perpetuating the division of society into civilized and uncivilized classes: I am far from being an anarchist, but even anarchy is better than this, which is in fact anarchy and despotism mixed: if there is no hope of conquering this—let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.

"Of course I do not discuss these matters with you or any person of good will in any bitterness of spirit: but there are people with whom it is hard to keep one's temper; such as the philistine middle-class Radical; who think, or pretend to, that now at last all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds."

"I am working at lectures and chintz-patterns hard," he writes a fortnight later; "perhaps poems will come too." But this was hardly meant seriously, or if it was,