THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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the brutality of its own representatives, namely as a stupid one. The clever man gives charitable gifts and certainly charitable opinions which are open to the idea of an
eight or even two­hour day, and of happiness for all, as a beautiful dream. The liberal bourgeoisie emotionally takes note of neediness, partly for the sake of something
to talk about, partly in order to reform it. The latter with household remedies which by no means undermine the fund, the fund of wealth from which the beneficent gift
comes after all. Big business was never short of kind­hearted writers with an aesthetically troubled glance at misery, least of all in England. Galsworthy, himself a
capitalist frigate, thus describes, in a novel which as lucus a non lucendo is called ‘Beyond’, a piece of contemporary London almost as Engels had described it, at least
a London which has remained as it was in Engels' time: ‘The usual route from the station to Bury Street was ‘‘up”, and the cab went by narrow by­streets, town lanes
where the misery of the world is on show, where ill­looking men, draggled and overdriven women, and the jaunty ghosts of little children in gutters and on doorsteps
proclaim, by every feature of their clay­coloured faces and every movement of their underfed bodies, the post­datement of the millennium; where the lean and smutted
houses have a look of dissolution indefinitely put off, and there is no more trace of beauty than in a sewer’. But this awareness of missing beauty causes the heroine of
the novel, the moved heroine, incidentally also a huntress and a friend of Polyhymnia, to do nothing more than — found a kindergarten. This is simply reformism or the
liberation of the proletariat by the riders who are sitting on it. Enough of this, enough about a philanthropy which moans and indeed accuses while at the same time
producing the stuff of the accusation. How nimbly, with how much rhetorical cant the patriotic English historian Macaulay speaks about the horrors of the East India
Company, about beastly exploiters like Warren Hastings and his successors, about the wretchedness of the Indian masses: ‘They had been accustomed to live under
tyranny, but never under tyranny like this. They found the little finger of the Company thicker than the loins of Surajah Dowlah. … It [the English government]
resembled the government of evil Genii, rather than the government of human tyrants . … and the palanquin of the English traveller was often carried through silent
villages and towns, which the report of his approach had made desolate.’ But the intellect which drives forth such truthful descriptions is always as sharp as a chisel of
soap, and it gets to the bottom of the matter as imperturbably as the patroness of a charity soirée; but it developed that awe­inspiring cunning which proposes to relieve
the crimes against