Watts’ _Hope_ does tell us something more about the nature of hope than we can be told by merely noticing that hope is shown in individual cases: that a man rehearses successful love speeches when he is in love, and takes a return ticket when he goes out to fight a duel. But the figure of Commerce with the cornucopia gives us less insight into what is behind commerce than we might get from reading a circular or staring out into the street. In the case of Commerce the figure is merely a symbol of commerce, which is a symbol. In the case of Hope the matter is quite the other way; the figure brings us nearer to something which is not a symbol, but the reality behind symbols. In the one case we go further down towards the river’s delta; in the other, further up towards its fountain; that at least may be called a difference. And now, suppose that our imaginary sight-seer who had seen so much of the pompous allegory of Commerce in her Grecian draperies were to see, for the second time, a second picture. Suppose he saw before him a throned figure clad in splendid, heavy scarlet and gold, above the lustre and dignity of which rose, in abrupt contrast, a face like the face of a blind beast. Suppose that as this imperial thing, with closed eyes and fat, sightless face, sat upon his magnificent seat, he let his heavy hand and feet fall, as if by a mere pulverizing accident, on the naked and god-like figures of the young, on men and women. Suppose that in the background there rose straight into the air a raw and turgid smoke, as if from some invisible and horrible sacrifice, and that by one final, fantastic, and triumphal touch this all-destroying god and king were adorned with the ears of an ass, declaring that he was royal, imperial, irresistible, and, when all is said, imbecile. Suppose that a man sick of argosies and cornucopias came before that picture, would he not say, perhaps even before he looked in the catalogue and found that the painter had called it _Mammon_, would he not say, “This is something which in spirit and in essence I have seen before, something which in spirit and in essence I have seen everywhere. That bloated, unconscious face, so heavy, so violent, so wicked, so innocent, have I not seen it at street corners, in billiard-rooms, in saloon bars, laying down the law about Chartered shares or gaping at jokes about women? Those huge and smashing limbs, so weighty, so silly, so powerless, and yet so powerful, have I not seen them in the pompous movements, the morbid health of the prosperous in the great cities? The hard, straight pillars of that throne, have I not seen them in the hard, straight, hideous tiers of modern warehouses and factories? That tawny and sulky smoke, have I not seen it going up to heaven from all the cities of the coming world? This is no trifling with argosies and Greek drapery. This is commerce. This is the home of the god himself. This is why men hate him, and why men fear him, and why men endure him.”