THIS MISERY OF BOOTS
association or what not, so that we may "count." For us, as for the early Christians, preaching our gospel is the supreme duty. Until Socialists can be counted, and counted upon by the million, little will be done. When they are—a new world will be ours.
Above all, if I may offer advice to a fellow-Socialist, I would say: Cling to the simple essential idea of Socialism, which is the abolition of private property in anything but what a man has earned or made. Do not complicate your cause with elaborations. And keep in your mind, if you can, some sort of talisman to bring you back to that essential gospel, out of the confusions and warring suggestions of every-day discussion.
For my own part, I have, as I said at the beginning, a prepossession with boots; and my talisman is this:—The figure of a badly fed but rather pretty little girl of ten or eleven, dirty, and her hands coarse with rough usage, her poor pretty child's body in ungainly rags, and, on her feet, big broken-down boots that hurt her. And particularly I think of her wretched sticks of legs and the limp of her feet; and all those phantom owners and profit-takers I spoke of, they are there about her martyrdom, leech-like, clinging to her as she goes. . . .
I want to change everything in the world that made that; and I do not greatly care what has to go in the process. Do you?
Here is just a bit of hard fact to carry out what I say. It is a quotation from a letter from a workman
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