finds himself at
one particular moment employed as a shop assistant. He has in himself
a power of terrible love, a promise of paternity, a thirst for some
loyalty that shall unify life, and in the ordinary course of things he
asks himself, "How far do the existing conditions of those assisting in
shops fit in with my evident and epic destiny in the matter of love and
marriage?" But here, as I have said, comes in the quiet and crushing
power of modern materialism. It prevents him rising in rebellion, as he
would otherwise do. By perpetually talking about environment and visible
things, by perpetually talking about economics and physical necessity,
painting and keeping repainted a perpetual picture of iron machinery
and merciless engines, of rails of steel, and of towers of stone, modern
materialism at last produces this tremendous impression in which the
truth is stated upside down. At last the result is achieved. The man
does not say as he ought to have said, "Should married men endure being
modern shop assistants?" The man says, "Should shop assistants marry?"
Triumph has completed the immense illusion of materialism. The
slave does not say, "Are these chains worthy of me?" The slave says
scientifically and contentedly, "Am I even worthy of these chains?"

XV. What I Found in My Pocket

Once when I was very young I met one of those men who have made
the Empire what it is--a man in an astracan coat, with an astracan
moustache--a tight, black, curly moustache. Whether he put on the
moustache with the coat or whether his Napoleonic will enabled him not
only to grow a moustache in the usual place, but also to grow little
moustaches all over his clothes, I do not know. I only remember that he
said to me the following words: "A man can't get on nowadays by hanging
about with his hands in his pockets." I made reply with the quite
obvious flippancy that perhaps a man got on by having his hands in other
people's pockets; whereupon he began to argue about Moral Evolution, so
I suppose what I said had some truth in it. But the incident now comes
back to me, and connects itself with another incident--if you can call
it an incident--which happened to me only the other day.

I have only once in my life picked a pocket, and then (perhaps through
some absent-mindedness) I picked my own. My act can really with some
reason be so described. For in taking things out of my own pocket I had
at least one of the more tense and quiver