Towards democracy

492 Towards Democracy d

Of the cancer eating slowly onward with its roots entwined in the vitals—the vista of agony and defeat by the curséd thing ;

Of the incurable filth, the venom in the lungs, breeding ~

2 slime and death within one through the interminable months ;

; ; 7

Ft

And these but samples of what waits, more or less, for

almost all ;

When one thinks of the sudden senseless accidents which ~

are for ever occurring—the ship returning home, full, with —

brimming hearts, from the Antipodes, ripped on a rock and

gone in a moment to the bottom:

A lurch, somewhere, of the shrinking earth-strata, and a -

whole city tumbled in shrieks and ruin; The ‘weight’ coming on in the coal-pit, the ominous fall of small stones from the roof, the awful cracking of the great

oak-props, the hurried rush of the miners and their swifter still _

entombment ; The breaking of a cable, or of a driving band in

machinery, a flaw in a wheel, a random step on a stairway— |

and husband torn from wife, and mother from child, or child from mother ;

Death and destruction and the messengers of death and ©

destruction in myriad forms still waiting to fulfil the inevitable doom ; When, I say, the necessity arises to face all this—and

face it out.

Then somehow, underneath it all, I seem to see that the strands of affection and love,