"It well may," said he, "so great as the change is. It would be
difficult indeed to tell you the whole story, perhaps impossible:
knowledge, discontent, treachery, disappointment, ruin, misery,
despair--those who worked for the change because they could see
further than other people went through all these phases of suffering;
and doubtless all the time the most of men looked on, not knowing
what was doing, thinking it all a matter of course, like the rising
and setting of the sun--and indeed it was so."

"Tell me one thing, if you can," said I. "Did the change, the
'revolution' it used to be called, come peacefully?"

"Peacefully?" said he; "what peace was there amongst those poor
confused wretches of the nineteenth century? It was war from
beginning to end: bitter war, till hope and pleasure put an end to
it."

"Do you mean actual fighting with weapons?" said I, "or the strikes
and lock-outs and starvation of which we have heard?"

"Both, both," he said. "As a matter of fact, the history of the
terrible period of transition from commercial slavery to freedom may
thus be summarised. When the hope of realising a communal condition
of life for all men arose, quite late in the nineteenth century, the
power of the middle classes, the then tyrants of society, was so
enormous and crushing, that to almost all men, even those who had,
you may say despite themselves, despite their reason and judgment,
conceived such hopes, it seemed a dream. So much was this the case
that some of those more enlightened men who were then called
Socialists, although they well knew, and even stated in public, that