uxurious home of
undetected robbers. In the house of man are many mansions; but there is
a class of men who feel normal nowhere except in the Babylon Hotel or
in Dartmoor Gaol. That big black face, which was staring at me with its
flaming eyes too close together, that was indeed the giant of all epic
and fairy tales. But, alas! I was not the giant-killer; the hour had
come, but not the man. I sat down on the seat again (I had had one wild
impulse to climb up the front of the hotel and fall in at one of the
windows), and I tried to think, as all decent people are thinking, what
one can really do. And all the time that oppressive wall went up in
front of me, and took hold upon the heavens like a house of the gods.

.....

It is remarkable that in so many great wars it has been the defeated
who have won. The people who were left worst at the end of the war
were generally the people who were left best at the end of the whole
business. For instance, the Crusades ended in the defeat of the
Christians. But they did not end in the decline of the Christians; they
ended in the decline of the Saracens. That huge prophetic wave of Moslem
power which had hung in the very heavens above the towns of Christendom,
that wave was broken, and never came on again. The Crusaders had saved
Paris in the act of losing Jerusalem. The same applies to that epic of
Republican war in the eighteenth century to which we Liberals owe our
political creed. The French Revolution ended in defeat: the kings came
back across a carpet of dead at Waterloo. The Revolution had lost its
last battle; but it had gained its first object. It had cut a chasm.
The world has never been the same since. No one after that has ever been
able to treat the poor merely as a pavement.

These jewels of God, the poor, are still treated as mere stones of the
street; but as stones that may sometimes fly. If it please God, you and
I may see some of the stones flying again before we see death. But here
I only remark the interesting fact that the conquered almost always
conquer. Sparta killed Athens with a final blow, and she was born again.
Sparta went away victorious, and died slowly of her own wounds. The
Boers lost the South African War and gained South Africa.

And this is really all that we can do when we fight something really
stronger than ourselves; we can deal it its death-wound one moment; it
deals us death in the end. It is something if we can shock and jar the
unthink