Noble the house was, nor seemed built for war, But rather like the work of other days, When men, in better peace than now they are, Had leisure on th… - William Morris

All wonder of pleasure, all doubt of desire, All blindness, are ended, and no more ye feel If your feet treat his flowers or the flames of his fire, If your breast meet his balms or the edge of his steel. Change is come, and past over, no more strife, no more learning: Now your lips and your forehead are sealed with his seal, Look backward and smile at the thorns and the burning. — Sweet rest, O my soul, and no fear of returning!

I must now shock you by telling you that we have no longer anything which you, a native of another planet, would call a government.

As a matter of fact, the history of the terrible period of transition from commercial slavery to freedom may thus be summarised. When the hope of realising a communal condition of life for all men arose, quite late in the nineteenth century, the power of the middle classes, the then tyrants of society, was so enormous and crushing, that to almost all men, even those who had, you may say despite themselves, despite their reason and judgement, conceived such hopes, it seemed a dream. So much was this the case that some of those more enlightened men who were then called Socialists, although they well knew, and even stated in public, that the only reasonable condition of Society was that of pure Communism (such as you now see around you), yet shrunk from what seemed to them the barren task of preaching the realisation of a happy dream. Looking back now, we can see that the great motive-power of the change was a longing for freedom and equality, akin if you please to the unreasonable passion of the lover; a sickness of heart that rejected with loathing the aimless solitary life of the well-educated man of that time: phrases, my dear friend, which have lost their meaning to us of the present day; so far removed we are from the dreadful facts which they represent.