Just
before I had ceased to go there I had sent my 'Wanderings of
Usheen' to his daughter, hoping of course that it might meet his
eyes, & soon after sending it I came upon him by chance in
Holborn. 'You write my sort of poetry,' he said and began to
praise me and to promise to send his praise to 'The Commonwealth,'
the League organ, and he would have said more of a certainty had
he not caught sight of a new ornamental cast-iron lamp-post and
got very heated upon that subject.
I did not read economics, having turned socialist because of
Morris's lectures and pamphlets, and I think it unlikely that Morris
himself could read economics. That old dogma of mine seemed germane
to the matter. If the men and women imagined by the poets were the
norm, and if Morris had, in, let us say, 'News from Nowhere,' then
running through 'The Commonwealth,' described such men and women
living under their natural conditions or as they would desire to
live, then those conditions themselves must be the norm, and could
we but get rid of certain institutions the world would turn from
eccentricity.
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