House of Nero. Your scheme can't be
worked. The anomalies are too obvious."

They are indeed. Yet I doubt whether the unimaginative would quite have
foreseen them: the things they foresee are less real and possible. But
they urge against every reform such objections as I have parodied; and
they urge them about matters of far less vital importance. The existing
system exists; they know its abuses, its checks and its counter-checks.
The system of the future does not yet exist; and they can't imagine how
its far slighter difficulties could ever be smoothed over. They are not
the least staggered by the appalling reality of the Duke of Westminster
or the Duke of Sutherland; not the least staggered by the sinister power
of a conspiracy of coal-owners to paralyse a great nation with the
horrors of a fuel famine. But they _are_ staggered by their bogey that
State ownership of land might give rise to a certain amount of jobbery
and corruption on the part of officials. They think it better that the
dukes and the squires should get all the rent than that the State should
get most of it, with the possibility of a percentage being corruptly
embezzled by the functionaries who manage it. This shows want of
imagination. It is as though one should say to one's clerk, "All your
income shall be paid in future to the Duke of Westminster, and not to
yourself, for his sole use and benefit; because we, your employers, are
afraid that if we give you your salary in person, you may let some of it
be stolen from you or badly invested." How transparently absurd! We want
our income ourselves, to spend as we please. We would rather risk losing
one per cent. of it in bad investments than let all be swallowed up by
the dukes and the landlords.

It is the same throughout. Want of imagination makes people exaggerate
the difficulties and dangers of every new scheme, because they can't
picture constructively to themselves the details of its working. Men
with great picturing power, like Shelley or Robespierre, are always very
advanced Radicals, and potentially revolutionists. The difficulty _they_
see is not the difficulty of making the thing work, but the difficulty
of convincing less clear-headed people of its desirability and
practicability. A great many Conservatives, who are Conservative from
selfishness, would be Radicals if only they could feel for themselves
that even their own petty interests and pleasures are not really
menaced. The squires and