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your coal-mine.’
’Not at all. Every beetle finds its own food. Not one man
is forced to work for me.
’Their lives are industrialized and hopeless, and so are
ours,’ she cried.
’I don’t think they are. That’s just a romantic figure of
speech, a relic of the swooning and die-away romanticism.
You don’t look at all a hopeless figure standing there, Con-
nie my dear.’
Which was true. For her dark-blue eyes were flashing, her
colour was hot in her cheeks, she looked full of a rebellious
passion far from the dejection of hopelessness. She noticed,
ill the tussocky places of the grass, cottony young cowslips
standing up still bleared in their down. And she wondered
with rage, why it was she felt Clifford was so WRONG, yet
she couldn’t say it to him, she could not say exactly WHERE
he was wrong.
’No wonder the men hate you,’ she said.
’They don’t!’ he replied. ‘And don’t fall into errors: in
your sense of the word, they are NOT men. They are ani-
mals you don’t understand, and never could. Don’t thrust
your illusions on other people. The masses were always
the same, and will always be the same. Nero’s slaves were
extremely little different from our colliers or the Ford mo-
tor-car workmen. I mean Nero’s mine slaves and his field
slaves. It is the masses: they are the unchangeable. An in-
dividual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence
doesn’t alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one
of the most momentous facts of social science. PANEM ET