As I came out of Glasgow I saw men standing about the road.  They had little lanterns tied to the fronts of their caps, like the fairies who used to dance in the old fairy pantomimes.  They were not, however, strictly speaking, fairies.  They might have been called gnomes, since they worked in the chasms of those purple and chaotic hills.  They worked in the mines from whence comes the fuel of our fires.  Just at the moment when I saw them, moreover, they were not dancing; nor were they working.  They were doing nothing.  Which, in my opinion (and I trust yours), was the finest thing they could do.

THE SECTARIAN OF SOCIETY

A fixed creed is absolutely indispensable to freedom.  For while men are and should be various, there must be some communication between them if they are to get any pleasure out of their variety.  And an intellectual formula is the only thing that can create a communication that does not depend on mere blood, class, or capricious sympathy.  If we all start with the agreement that the sun and moon exist, we can talk about our different visions of them.  The strong-eyed man can boast that he sees the sun as a perfect circle.  The shortsighted man may say (or if he is an impressionist, boast) that he sees the moon as a silver blur.  The colour-blind man may rejoice in the fairy-trick which enables him to live under a green sun and a blue moon.  But if once it be held that there is nothing but a silver blur in one man’s eye or a bright circle (like a monocle) in the other man’s, then neither is free, for each is shut up in the cell of a separate universe.

But, indeed, an even worse fate, practically considered, follows from the denim of the original intellectual formula.  Not only does the individual become narrow, but he spreads narrowness across the world like a cloud; he causes narrowness to increase and multiply like a weed.  For what happens is this:  that all the shortsighted people come together and build a city called Myopia, where they take short-sightedness for granted and paint short-sighted pictures and pursue very short-sighted policies.  Meanwhile all the men who can stare at the sun get together on Salisbury Plain and do nothing but stare at the sun; and all the men who see a blue moon band themselves together and assert the blue moon, not once in a blue moon, but incessantly.  So that instead of a small and varied group, you have enormous monotonous groups.  Instead of the liberty of dogma, you have the tyranny of taste.

Allegory apart, instances of what I mean will occur to every one; perhaps the most obvious is Socialism.  Socialism means the ownership by the organ of government (whatever it is) of all things necessary to production.  If a man claims to be a Socialist in that sense he can be any kind of man he likes in any other sense—­a bookie, a Mahatma, a man about town, an archbishop, a Margate nigger.  Without recalling at the moment clear-headed Socialists in all of these capacities, it is obvious that a clear-headed Socialist (that is, a Socialist with a creed) can be a soldier, like Mr. Blatchford, or a Don, like Mr. Ball, or a Bathchairman like Mr. Meeke, or a clergyman like Mr. Conrad Noel, or an artistic tradesman like the late Mr. William Morris.