Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/573

164 that matter, but you would have to admit that I was right, judging the thing from my starting point, namely that I am impelled to take action of some sort.

"I will talk of this matter when we meet: meantime, old chap, I send my best love to you for troubling about me.

"I wish I were not so damned old. If I were but twenty years younger! But then you know there would be the Female complication somewhere. Best as it is after all."

"I have often thought," he says in another letter of the same date, "that we should be overtaken by the course of events—overtaken unprepared I mean. It will happen again and again: and some of us will cut sorry figures in the confusion. I myself shall be glad when this ferment sinks down again. Things industrial are bad—I wish they would better: their doing so would not interfere with our propaganda, and would give us some chance of getting at working men with intelligence and some share of leisure. Yet if that will not come about, and the dominating classes will push revolution on us, let it be! the upshot must be good in the end. If you had only suffered as I have from the apathy of the English lower classes (woe's me how low!) you would rejoice at their awakening, however ugly the forms it took. As to my capacity for leadership in this turmoil, believe me, I feel as humble as could be wished: yet after all it is my life, and the work of it, and I must do my best."

The ferment sank down; and though his forecast of trouble with the police in summer was to be literally verified, he had soon resumed the regular routine of his work. "We had a very crowded meeting here on Sunday," he writes to Mrs. Morris on the 3rd of April: