exactly the same gross and stringent style. I do not deny, of course,
that there is something in the English temperament, and in the heritage of
the last few centuries that makes the English workman more tolerant of
wrong than most foreign workmen would be. But this only slightly modifies
the main fact of the moral responsibility. To take an imperfect parallel,
if we said that negro slaves would have rebelled if negroes had been more
intelligent, we should be saying what is reasonable. But if we were to
say that it could by any possibility be represented as being the negro's
fault that he was at that moment in America and not in Africa, we should
be saying what is frankly unreasonable. It is every bit as unreasonable
to say the mere supineness of the English workmen has put them in the
capitalist slave-yard. The capitalist has put them in the capitalist
slaveyard; and very cunning smiths have hammered the chains. It is just
this creative criminality in the authors of the system that we must not
allow to be slurred over. The capitalist is in the dock to-day; and so
far as I at least can prevent him, he shall not get out of it.



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE IRISH

It will be long before the poison of the Party System is worked out of the
body politic. Some of its most indirect effects are the most dangerous.
One that is very dangerous just now is this: that for most Englishmen the
Party System falsifies history, and especially the history of revolutions.
It falsifies history because it simplifies history. It paints everything
either Blue or Buff in the style of its own silly circus politics: while a
real revolution has as many colours as the sunrise--or the end of the
world. And if we do not get rid of this error we shall make very bad
blunders about the real revolution which seems to grow more and more