Such an apologue is literally no exaggeration of the facts
of English history. The rich did literally turn the poor out
of the old guest house on to the road, briefly telling them
that it was the road of progress. They did literally force them
into factories and the modern wage-slavery, assuring them all
the time that this was the only way to wealth and civilization.
Just as they had dragged the rustic from the convent food and ale
by saying that the streets of heaven were paved with gold,
so now they dragged him from the village food and ale by
telling him that the streets of London were paved with gold.
As he entered the gloomy porch of Puritanism, so he entered
the gloomy porch of Industrialism, being told that each of them
was the gate of the future. Hitherto he has only gone from prison
to prison, nay, into darkening prisons, for Calvinism opened
one small window upon heaven. And now he is asked, in the same
educated and authoritative tones, to enter another dark porch,
at which he has to surrender, into unseen hands, his children,
his small possessions and all the habits of his fathers.

Whether this last opening be in truth any more inviting than the old
openings of Puritanism and Industrialism can be discussed later.
But there can be little doubt, I think, that if some form
of Collectivism is imposed upon England it will be imposed,
as everything else has been, by an instructed political
class upon a people partly apathetic and partly hypnotized.
The aristocracy will be as ready to "administer" Collectivism as they
were to administer Puritanism or Manchesterism; in some ways such
a centralized political power is necessarily attractive to them.
It will not be so hard as some innocent Socialists seem to
suppose to induce the Honorable Tomnoddy to take over the milk