reason at all. But capitalist society, which naturally does not know the
meaning of honour, cannot know the meaning of disgrace: and it will still
go on imprisoning for no reason at all. Or rather for that rather simple
reason that makes a cat spring or a rat run away.

It matters little whether our masters stoop to state the matter in the
form that every prison should be a school; or in the more candid form that
every school should be a prison. They have already fulfilled their
servile principle in the case of the schools. Everyone goes to the
Elementary Schools except the few people who tell them to go there. I
prophesy that (unless our revolt succeeds) nearly everyone will be going
to Prison, with a precisely similar patience.



VIII. THE LASH FOR LABOUR

If I were to prophesy that two hundred years hence a grocer would have the
right and habit of beating the grocer's assistant with a stick, or that
shop girls might be flogged, as they already can be fined, many would
regard it as rather a rash remark. It would be a rash remark. Prophecy
is always unreliable; unless we except the kind which is avowedly
irrational, mystical and supernatural prophecy. But relatively to nearly
all the other prophecies that are being made around me to-day, I should
say my prediction stood an exceptionally good chance. In short, I think
the grocer with the stick is a figure we are far more likely to see than
the Superman or the Samurai, or the True Model Employer, or the Perfect
Fabian Official, or the citizen of the Collectivist State. And it is
best for us to see the full ugliness of the transformation which is
passing over our Society in some such abrupt and even grotesque image at