Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/891

 A Festival in Utopia

(From "News from Nowhere")

(See page 793)

"Once a year, on May-day, we hold a solemn feast in those easterly communes of London to commemorate the Clearing of Misery, as it is called. On that day we have music and dancing, and merry games and happy feasting on the site of some of the worst of the old slums, the traditional memory of which we have kept. On that occasion the custom is for the prettiest girls to sing some of the old revolutionary songs, and those which were the groans of discontent, once so hopeless, on the very spots where those terrible crimes of class-murder were committed day by day for so many years. To a man like me, who has studied the past so diligently, it is a curious and touching sight to see some beautiful girl, daintily clad, and crowned with flowers from the neighboring meadows, standing among the happy people, on some mound where of old time stood the wretched apology for a house,—a den in which men and women lived packed among the filth like pilchards in a cask; lived in such a way that they could only have endured it, as I said just now, by being degraded out of humanity. To hear the terrible words of threatening and lamentation coming from her sweet and beautiful lips, and she unconscious of their real meaning; to hear her singing Hood's 'Song of the Shirt,' and think all the time she does not understand what it is all about—a tragedy grown inconceivable to her and her listeners. Think of that if you can, and of how glorious life is grown!"

"Indeed," said I, "it is difficult for me to think of it."