Implicit behind and beyond all these writings there is faith in a great “outside.” I do believe there is a better life for such creatures as we are, and betterment for our race and an escape from the meanness, the dullness, the petty doomed life of this time. So far as I can go beyond my untrained feelings and my unsolved limitations I give myself to the attack upon our common prison walls of ignorance and effortless submission. In all these articles and books there is the thrust of the natural and conscious and convinced revolutionary. I am against the clothes we wear and the food we eat, the houses we live in, the schools we have, our amusements, our money, our ways of trading, our ways of making, our compromises and agreements and laws, our articles of political association, the British Empire, the American Constitution. I think most of the clothes ugly and dirty, most of the food bad, the houses wretched, the schools starved and feeble, the amusements dull, the monetary methods silly, our ways of trading base and wasteful, our methods of production piecemeal and wasteful, our political arrangements solemnly idiotic. Most of my activities have been to get my soul and something of my body out of the customs, outlook, boredoms, and contaminations of the current phase of life. I am not so very exceptional in this. Endless people find the present world--in spite of storms of natural beauty, in spite of the irregular delightful revelations of human possibility--almost intolerable. Indeed I do not know how far the occasional intense loveliness of nature and the rare gleams of human dearness and greatness, do not exacerbate their general discontent. They struggle to get away from it. Drink--“the shortest way out of Manchester,” as someone called it--a vicious pursuit of excitement, opiates and religious devotion, a widespread indulgence of reverie, are all forms of escape from the cruel flatness of uninspired days. But none of them, unless it be the religious excitement, give more than a temporary respite. When the orgy is over comes the awakening still in the cage. But in the idea of revolution which does not forget the cage, but realises its impermanence, there is an enduring support for the spirit.