lectures and papers which he contributed had also a real stimulative and educative value. Limited as was the number of people interested in the subject, they were to be counted by hundreds where those interested in theoretic Socialism could be reckoned on the fingers of one hand. When he resumed educational work in connexion with what was, after all, his own proper subject, on which he spoke with the ease and authority of an absolute master, he may indeed have felt that he was not striking at the root, but must also have recognized that he was not spending his blows on the air.
The echoes of the Trafalgar Square disturbances died slowly away. Popular attention in England was soon transferred to the action of the Government in Ireland under the Crimes Act of 1887: but Morris refused to be so turned off the point. "As to Blunt and his imprisonment," he wrote on the 14th of January (Mr. Wilfrid Blunt was a personal friend of his own, for whom he had a great liking), "from what I hear, the Irish prisons are better than the English. I don't see that we take it quietly specially because it is in Ireland: there are dozens of poor fellows in prison in England over the Trafalgar Square business, some of them for four or six months, for the same offence as Blunt's, and I fear little enough is said about them. However it is a bad business enough, nor do I deny that an English prison is torture, and is meant to be so. Doubtless it is bad that political prisoners like Blunt and the so-called rioters should be treated as criminals; but then the criminals are not treated as if they were human beings. The whole prison system in its folly, stupidity, and cruelty, is a disgrace to mankind; and the treatment of political prisoners is only one instance."
