uel terms as he chooses to impose.

Well, what would happen then, over the larger parts of the planet, parts
inhabited by savages? Savages, of course, would hunt and fish. That
retreat for the English poor was perceived; and that retreat was cut
off. Game laws were made to extend over districts like the Arctic snows
or the Sahara. The rich man had property over animals he had no more
dreamed of than a governor of Roman Africa had dreamed of a giraffe.
He owned all the birds that passed over his land: he might as well have
owned all the clouds that passed over it. If a rabbit ran from Smith's
land to Brown's land, it belonged to Brown, as if it were his pet dog.
The logical answer to this would be simple: Any one stung on Brown's
land ought to be able to prosecute Brown for keeping a dangerous wasp
without a muzzle.

Thus the poor man was forced to be a tramp along the roads and to sleep
in the open. That retreat was perceived; and that retreat was cut off.
A landless man in England can be punished for behaving in the only way
that a landless man can behave: for sleeping under a hedge in Surrey or
on a seat on the Embankment. His sin is described (with a hideous sense
of fun) as that of having no visible means of subsistence.

The last possibility, of course, is that upon which all human beings
would fall back if they were sinking in a swamp or impaled on a spike
or deserted on an island. It is that of calling out for pity to the
passerby. That retreat was perceived; and that retreat was cut off. A
man in England can be sent to prison for asking another man for help in
the name of God.

You have done all these things, and by so doing you have forced the poor
to serve the rich, and to serve them on the terms of the rich. They have
still one weapon left against the extremes of insult and unfairness:
that weapon is their numbers and the necessity of those numbers to the
working of that vast and slavish machine. And because they still had
this last retreat (which we call the Strike), because this retreat
was also perceived, there was talk of this retreat being also cut off.
Whereupon the workmen became suddenly and violently angry; and struck at
your Boards and Committees here, there, and wherever they could. And you
opened on them the eyes of owls, and said, "It must be the sunshine."
You could only go on saying, "The sun, the sun." That was what the man
in Ibsen said, when he had lost his wits.

THE WRONG INCEND