poetical expression from Shakespeare, he would say 'like unback'd colts
they pricked their ears, advanced their eyelids, lifted up their noses,
and calf-like follow'd through tooth'd briers, pricking goss, and
thorns, which enter'd their frail skins, into the filthy mantled pool,
where, dancing up to the chins, the foul lake o'er-stunk their feet.'
(It began to dawn upon the Liblabs that the Comrade was doing the very
thing desired. He was leading up to the customary denunciation of
some traitor. He was about to provide them with the name of the usual
scape-goat. They prolonged pleased ears in his direction.)
He would go further. He would say, still using the expressions of the
immortal bard of Avon, "Your fairy, which you say is a harmless fairy,
has done little better than played the Jack with us."
(This was something like! The meeting's ears positively flapped.)
And then, being unable to keep-on his pince-nez any longer by reason of
a steamed nose, he brought his climax to an abrupt term by demanding
the instant and public expulsion of Comrade Jerry Sant. That was voted
nem. con. The Liblab Fellowship shook-off the dust of its dirty feet
at the traitor; and Comrade Mat Matchwood said some very slighting
things about him in the _Salpinx_. No one is so facile and energetic
about believing evil as a Pessimist, that is to say a Socialist;
and, when one traitor is detected, what could be more natural than
for others to be suspected. It happened so. The mutual jealousy, the
flaring incompetency, the sordid selfishness, which always infected
the socialist demagogues, and (of course) the essentially sandy
foundation upon which the socialist system was based, led to further
and more fatal dissensions. Suspicion mated with Baffled Purpose.
Recrimination was the offspring of the match. The fellow-shippers, who
had connived at the scheme of Jerry Sant, found themselves accused as
his accomplices, and denounced and expelled in turn. From dissension
it was no more than one step to disunion. Each demagogue, fearful
lest he should have to take up an honest trade for a livelihood,
devoted persuasive loquacity to the attracting of personal supporters.
Burnson battened on Battersea. West Ham went a-whoring after strange
Bills. Glasgow got into the galley of Kerardy. And Devana succumbed
to a split-thumb-nailed and anarchistic plumber. Schisms within
schisms insued. Dens and caves received the remnants of the Liblab
Fellowship. Mutual damnation was the order of the day. The Socialists
were almost Christian. The ranks were thinned by internecine war.
Then came desertions. Socialism didn't pay; and socialists openly
asked conservative agents for tory gold. When it was refused, they
swore (after their kind). Labor (without the u) looked about for the
patronage of Capital. And British Socialism was in a fair way to perish
of its own radical fatuity, and instability.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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