d a tacit confession of
dependence. "Alas," says Wordsworth, in one of his pregnant phrases,
"the gratitude of men has oftener left me mourning" than their
cold-heartedness; because, I presume, it is a painful proof of the
rarity of kindness. When one man can only receive a gift and another
can only bestow it as a payment on account of a long accumulation of
the arrears of class injustice, the relations hardly admit of genuine
gratitude on either side. What grates most painfully upon me, and, I
suppose, upon most of us, is the "servility" of man; the acceptance of
a beggar's code of morals as natural and proper for any one in a shabby
coat. The more prominent evil just now, according to conservatives and
pessimists, is the correlative one of the beggar on horseback; of the
man who has found out that he can squeeze more out of his masters, and
uses his power even without considering whether it is wise to drain
your milch cow too exhaustively.

A hope of better things is encouraged by schemes for arbitration and
conciliation between employers and employed. But we require a moral
change if arbitration is to imply something more than a truce between
natural enemies, and conciliation to be something different from that
employed by Hood's butcher when, after hauling a sheep by main force
into the slaughter-house, he exclaimed, "There, I've conciliated
_him_!" The only principle on which arbitration can proceed is
that the profits should be divided in such a way as to be a sufficient
inducement to all persons concerned to give their money or their
labour, mental or physical, to promote the prosperity of the business
at large. But the reconciliation can only be complete when the
capitalist is capable of employing his riches with enough public spirit
and generosity to disarm mere envy by his obvious utility, and the poor
man justifies his increased wages by his desire to secure permanent
benefits and a better standard of life. In Utopia, the question will
still be, what plan shall be a sufficient inducement to the men who
co-operate as employers or labourers, but the inducement will appeal to
better motives, and the positions be so far equalised that each will be
most tolerable to the man best fitted for it.

Here a vast series of problems opens about which I can only suggest the
briefest hint. The principle I now urge is the old one, namely, that
the usual mark of a quack remedy is the neglect of the moral aspect of
a questio