the only reasonable condition of Society was that of pure Communism
(such as you now see around you), yet shrunk from what seemed to them
the barren task of preaching the realisation of a happy dream.
Looking back now, we can see that the great motive-power of the
change was a longing for freedom and equality, akin if you please to
the unreasonable passion of the lover; a sickness of heart that
rejected with loathing the aimless solitary life of the well-to-do
educated man of that time: phrases, my dear friend, which have lost
their meaning to us of the present day; so far removed we are from
the dreadful facts which they represent.

"Well, these men, though conscious of this feeling, had no faith in
it, as a means of bringing about the change. Nor was that wonderful:
for looking around them they saw the huge mass of the oppressed
classes too much burdened with the misery of their lives, and too
much overwhelmed by the selfishness of misery, to be able to form a
conception of any escape from it except by the ordinary way
prescribed by the system of slavery under which they lived; which was
nothing more than a remote chance of climbing out of the oppressed
into the oppressing class.

"Therefore, though they knew that the only reasonable aim for those
who would better the world was a condition of equality; in their
impatience and despair they managed to convince themselves that if
they could by hook or by crook get the machinery of production and
the management of property so altered that the 'lower classes' (so
the horrible word ran) might have their slavery somewhat ameliorated,
they would be ready to fit into this machinery, and would use it for
bettering their condition still more and still more, until at last
the result would be a practical equality (they were very fond of