comes you may be ready to take from our
hands the creaking oar, to slip into our seat at the roaring loom. For
we shall not be slaves for ever, little children. It is the good law
of the land. So many years in the galleys, so many years in the fields;
then we can claim our freedom. Then we shall go, little children, back
to the land of our birth. And you we must leave behind us to take up the
tale of our work. So, off to your schools, little children, and learn to
be good little slaves.

Next, pompous and sleek, come the educated slaves--journalists, doctors,
judges, and poets; the attorney, the artist, the player, the priest.
They likewise scurry across the Park, looking anxiously from time
to time at their watches, lest they be late for their appointments;
thinking of the rates and taxes to be earned, of the bonnets to be paid
for, the bills to be met. The best scourged, perhaps, of all, these
slaves. The cat reserved for them has fifty tails in place of merely two
or three. Work, you higher middle-class slave, or you shall come down to
the smoking of twopenny cigars; harder yet, or you shall drink shilling
claret; harder, or you shall lose your carriage and ride in a penny bus;
your wife's frocks shall be of last year's fashion; your trousers shall
bag at the knees; from Kensington you shall be banished to Kilburn, if
the tale of your bricks run short. Oh, a many-thonged whip is yours, my
genteel brother.

The slaves of fashion are the next to pass beneath me in review. They
are dressed and curled with infinite pains. The liveried, pampered
footman these, kept more for show than use; but their senseless tasks
none the less labour to them. Here must they come every day, merry or
sad. By this gravel path and no other must they walk; these phrases
shall they use when they speak to one another. For an hour they must go
slowly up and down upon a bicycle from Hyde Park Corner to the Magazine
and back. And these clothes must they wear; their gloves of this colour,
their neck-ties of this pattern. In the afternoon they must return
again, this time in a carriage, dressed in another livery, and for an
hour they must pass slowly to and fro in foolish procession. For dinner
they must don yet another livery, and after dinner they must stand about
at dreary social functions till with weariness and boredom their heads
feel dropping from their shoulders.

With the evening come the slaves back from their work: barristers,
thinkin