Towards democracy

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24 Towards Democracy

O happy happy guides! to whom such mighty issues are confided }

Happy happy Child! who need not stay to hear the end of their talk! whom I saw, in vision, silent and musing within itself, pass away from among those people.

XVI Will you continually deny yourself, you? Will you for ever turn aside? ‘These are not the times, remember, of canary birds—when the thunder growls along the horizon. O England, do I not know thee strangled tied and bound ? » Thy poverty—when through thy filthy courts from tangles

as in a nightmare

of matted hair gaunt women with venomous faces look upon me?

When I see the thin joyless faces of their children, and the brick walls scarcely recognisable as brick for dirt, and the broken windows ; when I breathe the thick polluted air in which not even plants will live; when oaths and curses are yelled in my ears, and the gibbering face of drink starts upon me at every corner ;

When I turn from this and consider throughout the length and breadth of the land, not less but more hateful, the insane greed of riches—of which poverty and.its evils are but the necessary obverse and counterpart ;

When I see deadly Respectability sitting at its dinner table, quaffing its wine, and discussing the mse and fall of stocks; when I see the struggle, the fear, the envy, the profound infidelity (so profound that it is almost unconscious of itself) in which the moneyed classes live ;