for his friendly remarks, but assured him that he regarded it as an uncommon delight to come to Coatbridge, or elsewhere, with his comrades and share in their propaganda experiences.
'And after all, my friend,' he added, with a twinkle in his eye, 'I wish to remind you that this is just the sort of way that Diogenes and Christ and, for all we know, Homer, and your own Blind Harry the Minstrel used to get their audiences; so I am not so far out of the high literary conventions after all! And besides, what we Socialists are out for is not to win the support of the dilettante literary and art people (though we don't in the least degree exclude them from the hope of salvation), but of the working class, who suffer most by the present system and have the most to gain by upsetting it and putting Socialism in its stead.'
There were a number of questions. One particularly—it was put by a miner—Morris answered with evident pleasure: 'Does the lecturer propose to do away with coal-mining, and, if so, what would we do for fuel?'
'Our friend's question is quite a proper one,' replied Morris; 'but I must warn him that on some of these industrial matters I am regarded as somewhat of a heretic, even amongst Socialists. For myself, I should be glad if we could do without coal, and indeed without burrowing like worms and moles in the earth altogether; and I am not sure but we could do without it if we wished to live pleasant lives, and did not want to produce all manner of mere mechanism chiefly for multiplying our own servitude and misery, and spoiling half the beauty and art of the world to make merchants and manufacturers rich. In olden days the people did without coal, and were, I believe, rather more happy than we are to-day, and produced better art, poetry, and quite as good religion and philosophy as we do nowadays. But without saying we can do without coal, I will say that we could do with less than half of what we use now, if we lived properly and produced only really useful,
