come when people will find it difficult to believe that a rich
community such as ours, having such command over external Nature,
could have submitted to live such a mean, shabby, dirty life as we
do.

And once for all, there is nothing in our circumstances save the
hunting of profit that drives us into it. It is profit which draws
men into enormous unmanageable aggregations called towns, for
instance; profit which crowds them up when they are there into
quarters without gardens or open spaces; profit which won't take the
most ordinary precautions against wrapping a whole district in a
cloud of sulphurous smoke; which turns beautiful rivers into filthy
sewers; which condemns all but the rich to live in houses idiotically
cramped and confined at the best, and at the worst in houses for
whose wretchedness there is no name.

I say it is almost incredible that we should bear such crass
stupidity as this; nor should we if we could help it. We shall not
bear it when the workers get out of their heads that they are but an
appendage to profit-grinding, that the more profits that are made the
more employment at high wages there will be for them, and that
therefore all the incredible filth, disorder, and degradation of
modern civilization are signs of their prosperity. So far from that,
they are signs of their slavery. When they are no longer slaves they
will claim as a matter of course that every man and every family
should be generously lodged; that every child should be able to play
in a garden close to the place his parents live in; that the houses
should by their obvious decency and order be ornaments to Nature, not
disfigurements of it; for the decency and order above-mentioned when
carried to the due pitch would most assuredly lead to beauty in