him. He forswears love as thousands of us forswear it every day;
and in a moment the gold is in his grasp, and he disappears in
the depths, leaving the water-fairies vainly screaming "Stop
thief!" whilst the river seems to plunge into darkness and sink
from us as we rise to the cloud regions above.

And now, what forces are there in the world to resist Alberic,
our dwarf, in his new character of sworn plutocrat? He is soon at
work wielding the power of the gold. For his gain, hordes of his
fellow-creatures are thenceforth condemned to slave miserably,
overground and underground, lashed to their work by the invisible
whip of starvation. They never see him, any more than the victims
of our "dangerous trades" ever see the shareholders whose power
is nevertheless everywhere, driving them to destruction. The very
wealth they create with their labor becomes an additional force
to impoverish them; for as fast as they make it it slips from
their hands into the hands of their master, and makes him
mightier than ever. You can see the process for yourself in every
civilized country today, where millions of people toil in want
and disease to heap up more wealth for our Alberics, laying up
nothing for themselves, except sometimes horrible and agonizing
disease and the certainty of premature death. All this part of
the story is frightfully real, frightfully present, frightfully
modern; and its effects on our social life are so ghastly and
ruinous that we no longer know enough of happiness to be
discomposed by it. It is only the poet, with his vision of what
life might be, to whom these things are unendurable. If we were a
race of poets we would make an end of them before the end of this
miserable century. Being a race of moral dwarfs instead, we think
them highly respectable, comfortable and proper, and allow them