defence of their position is that since we are not medieval
rovers through a sparsely populated country, the poverty of those
we rob prevents our having the good life for which we sacrifice
them. Rich men or aristocrats with a developed sense of life--men
like Ruskin and William Morris and Kropotkin--have enormous
social appetites and very fastidious personal ones. They are not
content with handsome houses: they want handsome cities. They are
not content with bediamonded wives and blooming daughters: they
complain because the charwoman is badly dressed, because the
laundress smells of gin, because the sempstress is anemic,
because every man they meet is not a friend and every woman not a
romance. They turn up their noses at their neighbors' drains, and
are made ill by the architecture of their neighbors' houses.
Trade patterns made to suit vulgar people do not please them (and
they can get nothing else): they cannot sleep nor sit at ease
upon "slaughtered" cabinet makers' furniture. The very air is not
good enough for them: there is too much factory smoke in it. They
even demand abstract conditions: justice, honor, a noble moral
atmosphere, a mystic nexus to replace the cash nexus. Finally
they declare that though to rob and pill with your own hand on
horseback and in steel coat may have been a good life, to rob and
pill by the hands of the policeman, the bailiff, and the soldier,
and to underpay them meanly for doing it, is not a good life, but
rather fatal to all possibility of even a tolerable one. They
call on the poor to revolt, and, finding the poor shocked at
their ungentlemanliness, despairingly revile the proletariat for
its "damned wantlessness" (verdammte Bedurfnislosigkeit).

So far, however, their attack on society has lacked simplicity.
The poor do not share their tastes nor understand their