“From the haunts of daily life,
Where is waged the daily strife
With common wants and common cares,
Which sow the human heart with tares.”

When face to face with their oppressors, no force should be used, but instead

           “strong and simple words,
    Keen to wound as sharpened swords,
    And wide as targes let them be,
    With their shade to cover ye.”

The description of the Peterloo massacre which follows, is one of the finest pieces of composition in the language, and the poem concludes by calling the “Men of England, Heirs of Glory, Heroes of Unwritten Story,” to

“Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable NUMBER! 
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fall’n on you;
‘YE ARE MANY—­THEY ARE FEW.’”

In a pamphlet, written ostensibly on the death of the Princess Charlotte, he calls attention to the fact that three men had been executed in the interests of the “big-hearted and generous capitalists,” of whom we now-a-days hear so much from their interested admirers, but whose wings are now fortunately clipped.

Shelley considered that there was no real wealth but man’s labor, and that speculators pandering to selfishness, the twin-sister of debased theology, took a pride in the production of useless articles of luxury and ostentation.  Imbued with this spirit, a man of wealth imagines himself a patriot when employing laborers on the erection of a mansion, or a woman of fashion indulging in luxurious dress, fancies she is aiding the laboring poor.  He observes of such instances as these: 

“Who does not see that this is a remedy which aggravates, whilst it palliates the countless diseases of society?  The poor are set to labor—­for what?  Not the food for which they famish; not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels; not those comforts of civilization without which civilized man is far more miserable than the meanest savage, oppressed as he is by all its insidious evils, within the daily and taunting prospect of its innumerable benefits assiduously exhibited before him; no, for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of the hundredth part of society.”

Labor is required for physical, and leisure for moral improvement.  What is wanted, he considered, is a state to combine the advantages of both and have the evils of neither.  In fact, any unnecessary labor which deprives the race of intellectual gain, and all times not required for the manufacture of commodities which are necessary for the subsistence of humanity, should be occupied only in mental or physical culture.

Shelley lays down as a principle that commerce is the venal interchange of what human art or nature yields, and which should not be purchased by wealth, but demanded by want.  Labor and commerce, when badly regulated, scatter withering curses and open