ng the work gratuitously out of sheer folly and
abjectness, impose only on the hirers.

The reason why the independent income-tax payers are not solid in
defence of their position is that since we are not medieval rovers
through a sparsely populated country, the poverty of those we rob
prevents our having the good life for which we sacrifice them. Rich men
or aristocrats with a developed sense of life--men like Ruskin and
William Morris and Kropotkin--have enormous social appetites and very
fastidious personal ones. They are not content with handsome houses:
they want handsome cities. They are not content with bediamonded wives
and blooming daughters: they complain because the charwoman is badly
dressed, because the laundress smells of gin, because the sempstress is
anemic, because every man they meet is not a friend and every woman not
a romance. They turn up their noses at their neighbors' drains, and are
made ill by the architecture of their neighbors' houses. Trade patterns
made to suit vulgar people do not please them (and they can get nothing
else): they cannot sleep nor sit at ease upon "slaughtered" cabinet
makers' furniture. The very air is not good enough for them: there is
too much factory smoke in it. They even demand abstract conditions:
justice, honor, a noble moral atmosphere, a mystic nexus to replace the
cash nexus. Finally they declare that though to rob and pill with your
own hand on horseback and in steel coat may have been a good life, to
rob and pill by the hands of the policeman, the bailiff, and the
soldier, and to underpay them meanly for doing it, is not a good life,
but rather fatal to all possibility of even a tolerable one. They call
on the poor to revolt, and, finding the poor shocked at their
ungentlemanliness, despairingly revile the proletariat for its "damned
wantlessness" (verdammte Bedurfnislosigkeit).

So far, however, their attack on society has lacked simplicity. The
poor do not share their tastes nor understand their art-criticisms.
They do not want the simple life, nor the esthetic life; on the
contrary, they want very much to wallow in all the costly vulgarities
from which the elect souls among the rich turn away with loathing. It
is by surfeit and not by abstinence that they will be cured of their
hankering after unwholesome sweets. What they do dislike and despise
and are ashamed of is poverty. To ask them to fight for the difference
between the Christmas number of the Illust