News from Nowhere: Or, an Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance by William Morris

Author:William Morris
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Utopias
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2023-11-07T21:12:26+00:00

XVIII

The Be­gin­ning of the New Life

“Well,” said I, “so you got clear out of all your trouble. Were people sat­is­fied with the new or­der of things when it came?”

“People?” he said. “Well, surely all must have been glad of peace when it came; es­pe­cially when they found, as they must have found, that after all, they—even the once rich—were not liv­ing very badly. As to those who had been poor, all through the war, which las­ted about two years, their con­di­tion had been bet­ter­ing, in spite of the struggle; and when peace came at last, in a very short time they made great strides to­wards a de­cent life. The great dif­fi­culty was that the once-poor had such a feeble con­cep­tion of the real pleas­ure of life; so to say, they did not ask enough, did not know how to ask enough, from the new state of things. It was per­haps rather a good than an evil thing that the ne­ces­sity for restor­ing the wealth des­troyed dur­ing the war forced them in­to work­ing at first al­most as hard as they had been used to be­fore the Re­volu­tion. For all his­tor­i­ans are agreed that there nev­er was a war in which there was so much de­struc­tion of wares, and in­stru­ments for mak­ing them as in this civil war.”

“I am rather sur­prised at that,” said I.

“Are you? I don’t see why,” said Ham­mond.

“Why,” I said, “be­cause the party of or­der would surely look upon the wealth as their own prop­erty, no share of which, if they could help it, should go to their slaves, sup­pos­ing they conquered. And on the oth­er hand, it was just for the pos­ses­sion of that wealth that ‘the rebels’ were fight­ing, and I should have thought, es­pe­cially when they saw that they were win­ning, that they would have been care­ful to des­troy as little as pos­sible of what was so soon to be their own.”

“It was as I have told you, how­ever,” said he. “The party of or­der, when they re­covered from their first cow­ardice of sur­prise—or, if you please, when they fairly saw that, whatever happened, they would be ruined, fought with great bit­ter­ness, and cared little what they did, so long as they in­jured the en­emies who had des­troyed the sweets of life for them. As to ‘the rebels,’ I have told you that the out­break of ac­tu­al war made them care­less of try­ing to save the wretched scraps of wealth that they had. It was a com­mon say­ing amongst them, Let the coun­try be cleared of everything ex­cept vali­ant liv­ing men, rather than that we fall in­to slavery again!”

He sat si­lently think­ing a little while, and then said—

“When the con­flict was once really be­gun, it was seen how little of any value there was in the old world of slavery and in­equal­ity. Don’t you see what it means? In the times which you are think­ing of, and of which you seem to know so much, there was no hope; noth­ing but the dull jog of

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