eads three
times), and I rather think that exceptions might be found to the
principle. Yet it is not chiefly such exceptions that embarrass my
belief in it.

No; my difficulty is rather in accounting for the strange coincidence by
which the shafts of Apollo split us exclusively along certain lines of
class and of economics. I cannot understand why all solicitors did not
leave off soliciting, all doctors leave off doctoring, all judges leave
off judging, all benevolent bankers leave off lending money at high
interest, and all rising politicians leave off having nothing to add to
what their right honourable friend told the House about eight years
ago. The quaint theoretic plea of the workers, that they were striking
because they were ill paid, seems to receive a sort of wild and hazy
confirmation from the fact that, throughout the hottest weather, judges
and other persons who are particularly well paid showed no disposition
to strike. I have to fall back therefore on metaphysical fancies of my
own; and I continue to believe that the anger of the English poor (to
steal a phrase from Sir Thomas Browne) came from something in man that
is other than the elements and that owes no homage unto the sun.

When comfortable people come to talking stuff of that sort, it is really
time that the comfortable classes made a short summary and confession
of what they have really done with the very poor Englishman. The dawn of
the mediaeval civilisation found him a serf; which is a different thing
from a slave. He had security; although the man belonged to the land
rather than the land to the man. He could not be evicted; his rent could
not be raised. In practice, it came to something like this: that if the
lord rode down his cabbages he had not much chance of redress; but he
had the chance of growing more cabbages. He had direct access to the
means of production.

Since then the centuries in England have achieved something different;
and something which, fortunately, is perfectly easy to state. There is
no doubt about what we have done. We have kept the inequality, but we
have destroyed the security. The man is not tied to the land, as in
serfdom; nor is the land tied to the man, as in a peasantry. The rich
man has entered into an absolute ownership of farms and fields; and (in
the modern industrial phrase) he has locked out the English people. They
can only find an acre to dig or a house to sleep in by accepting such
competitive and cr