into a mad-house instead. Symbolically speaking, that is what they would
like to do with us. Symbolically speaking, the dirty misers who rule us
will put us in a mad-house--unless we can put them there.

Or suppose a bank cashier were admittedly allowed to take the money out of
the till, and put it loose in his pocket, more or less mixed up with his
own money; afterwards laying some of both (at different odds) on "Blue
Murder" for the Derby. Suppose when some depositor asked mildly what day
the accountants came, he smote that astonished inquirer on the nose,
crying: "Slanderer! Mud-slinger!" and suppose he then resigned his
position. Suppose no books were shown. Suppose when the new cashier
came to be initiated into his duties, the old cashier did not tell him
about the money, but confided it to the honour and delicacy of his own
maiden aunt at Cricklewood. Suppose he then went off in a yacht to visit
the whale fisheries of the North Sea. Well, in every moral and legal
principle, that is a precise account of the dealings with the Party Funds.
But what would the banker say? What would the clients say? One thing, I
think, I can venture to promise; the banker would not march up and down
the office exclaiming in rapture, "I'm a rebel! That's what I am, a rebel!"
And if he said to the first indignant depositor "You are a rebel," I
fear the depositor might answer, "You are a robber." We have no need to
elaborate arguments for breaking the law. The capitalists have broken the
law. We have no need of further moralities. They have broken their own
morality. It is as if you were to run down the street shouting,
"Communism! Communism! Share! Share!" after a man who had run away with
your watch.

We want a term that will tell everybody that there is, by the common
standard, frank fraud and cruelty pushed to their fierce extreme; and that
we are fighting THEM. We are not in a state of "divine discontent"; we are