Even with a basin one is bound to splash the furniture. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system. We were therefore sleeping in what was still recognizably a drawing-room. As Mr Aldous Huxley has truly remarked, a dark Satanic mill ought to look like a dark Satanic mill and not like the temple of mysterious and splendid gods. To begin with, many people have no ear for accent and judge you entirely by your clothes. But the cult is often adopted by people who are not by birth Northerners themselves. But even when tramps are aware that you are of different origin from themselves, it does not necessarily alter their attitude. Rent 5s., including rates.And so on and so on and so on. The element of truth in it is this: that the appearance of Communist activity warns the ruling class that democratic Labour Parties are no longer capable of holding the working class in check, and that capitalist dictatorship must assume another form if it is to survive.You see here the defects of the method. The exhausted air is sucked out of one shaft by means of fans, and the fresh air enters the other of its own accord. It goes against the grain to say this, but one can see why it should be so. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water. I would go suitably disguised to Limehouse and Whitechapel and such places and sleep in common lodging-houses and pal up with dock labourers, street hawkers, derelict people, beggars, and, if possible, criminals. I was very young, not much more than six, when I first became aware of class-distinctions. The ‘firewood’ was his furniture.The most cruel and evil effect of the Means Test is the way in which it breaks up families. But that, I am afraid, is not going to happen. I often wonder whether that kind of stuff deceives even the fools who utter it. I remember once when I was inspecting a police station, an American missionary whom I knew fairly well came in for some purpose or other. He is a man when the other is still a baby. Floor lopsided. Pacifism, internationalism, humanitarianism of all kinds, feminism, free love, divorce-reform, atheism, birth-control — things like these were getting a better hearing than they would get in normal times. In some cases I have noted ‘Landlord good’ or ‘Landlord bad’, because there is great variation in what the slum-dwellers say about their landlords. None in work except eldest son. House in Scholes quarter. Occasionally, of course, the charge is too powerful, and then it not only brings the coal out but brings the roof down as well.After the blasting has been done the ‘fillers’ can tumble the coal out, break it up and shovel it on to the conveyor belt. Before starting work a miner often tests for gas by poking his lamp into all the corners. Even people on the verge of starvation can buy a few days' hope (‘Something to live for’, as they call it) by having a penny on a sweepstake. And the other conditions do not exactly make things easier. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that’ It isn't the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. Actually they, snatch a quarter of an hour or so at some time during the shift to eat the food they have brought with them, usually a hunk of bread and dripping and a bottle of cold tea. Rent 3s. It is happening all over England at this moment, thanks to the Means Test.Nevertheless, in spite of the frightful extent of unemployment, it is a fact that poverty — extreme poverty — is less in evidence in the industrial North than it is in London. In Sheffield I was taken to a public hall to listen to a lecture by a clergyman, and it was by a long way the silliest and worst-delivered lecture I have ever heard or ever expect to hear. At a pitch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farm hand. Anything is relevant which helps to make clear why Socialism is not accepted. Everything is poorer and shabbier, there are fewer motor-cars and fewer well-dressed people; but also there are fewer people who are obviously destitute. Whether it is a sound or unsound case hardly matters. Walls upstairs cracking. All the people in those cottages there are worthless, absolutely worthless.’I could not help inquiring whether he happened to know anybody in that village. I now realized that there was no need to go as far as Burma to find tyranny and exploitation. Take a coal-miner, for example.
It was easy to laugh at Fascism when we imagined that it was based on hysterical nationalism, because it seemed obvious that the Fascist states, each regarding itself as the chosen people and patriotic And finally, is there anything one can do about it?In the first part of this book I illustrated, by a few brief sidelights, the kind of mess we are in; in this second part I have been trying to explain why, in my opinion, so many normal decent people are repelled by the only remedy, namely by Socialism. As I have pointed out already, the machine has got us in its grip and to escape will be immensely difficult.
The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the distance, stretched the ‘flashes’ — pools of stagnant water that had seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. In Burma the issue had been quite simple. Owing to uselessness of tiny bedroom, five are sleeping in one bedroom, one (the eldest son) in the other.’Rent 10s. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion. which lay deeper than the economic motive; and in The first thing to notice is that the idea of Socialism is bound up, more or less inextricably, with the idea of machine-production.