a frog under the wheel of destiny. That may be a disaster, but it is
only a mess for all that.

On the other hand, if they have a fight to fight they might really
drop the bone. Instead of wrangling the bone to bits they might
really go straight for one another. They are like hostile parties on
board a ship, who both proceed to scuttle the ship so as to sink the
other party. Down goes the ship, with all the bally lot on board. A
few survivors swim and squeal among the bubbles--and then silence.

It is too much to suppose that the combatants will ever drop the
obvious old bone. But it is not too much to imagine that some men
might acknowledge the bone to be merely a pretext, and hollow _casus
belli_. If we really could know what we were fighting for, if we
if we could deeply believe in what we were fighting for, then the
struggle might have dignity, beauty, satisfaction for us. If it were
a profound struggle for something that was coming to life in us, a
struggle that we were convinced would bring us to a new freedom, a
new life, then it would be a creative activity, a creative activity
in which death is a climax in the progression towards new being. And
this is tragedy.

Therefore, if we could but comprehend or feel the tragedy in the
great Labour struggle, the intrinsic tragedy of having to pass
through death to birth, our souls would still know some happiness,
the very happiness of creative suffering. Instead of which we pile
accident on accident, we tear the fabric of our existence fibre by
fibre, we confidently look forward to the time when the whole great
structure will come down on our heads. Yet after all that, when we
are squirming under the debris, we shall have no more faith or hope