Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/60

ground of contact between my past and my present. Let me say at least this for my order. There are still men and women in it ready to admit the New Light, and to sacrifice themselves for it. Show to them the iniquity of their former privilege, and they will, many of them, voluntarily renounce it all, and throw in their lot with the exploited sufferers. Abuse the eighteenth-century French aristocrats as you please, but under Louis xvi. they were, many of them, noble and unselfish to a pitch unheard-of in any other dominant class in all history. But your Middle class—your Shopkeepers? Never, never! At all costs, save sheer "funk," they must have their pound (and somebody else's half-pound) of flesh. Oh, I have not lived seven years in the States without realising that the English landlord is an angel of reasonableness and mercy beside the American capitalist; and what is the American capitalist but the apotheosis of the Mercator Imperator? I have more hopes (small though they be) of our English gentlemen than of our English plutocrats, and of these last, you, my one time friend, have made yourself one of the most—famous. Do you know the reputation you have among the workmen of the period? For such reputations are international now, and the Labour leader of Chicago or Sydney listens to the story of the capitalistic