They had
all the audacity needed for speaking to the despot; but not the simplicity
needed for speaking to the democracy. They were always accused of being
too bitter against the capitalist. But it always seemed to me that they
were (quite unconsciously, of course) much too kind to him. They had a
fatal habit of using long words, even on occasions when he might with
propriety have been described in very short words. They called him a
Capitalist when almost anybody in Christendom would have called him a cad.
And "cad" is a word from the poetic vocabulary indicating rather a
general and powerful reaction of the emotions than a status that could be
defined in a work of economics. The capitalist, asleep in the sun, let
such long words crawl all over him, like so many long, soft, furry
caterpillars. Caterpillars cannot sting like wasps. And, in repeating
that the old Marxians have been, perhaps, the best and bravest men of our
time, I say also that they would have been better and braver still if they
had never used a scientific word, and never read anything but fairy tales.
The Beastly Individualist
Suppose I go on to a ship, and the ship sinks almost immediately; but I
(like the people in the Bab Ballads), by reason of my clinging to a mast,
upon a desert island am eventually cast.
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