19. Imagination and Radicals - Page 2

unimaginative pettifoggers.

To people without imagination any change you propose seems at once
impracticable. They are ready to bring up endless objections to the mode
of working it. There would be this difficulty in the way, and that
difficulty, and the other one. You would think, to hear them talk, the
world as it stands was absolutely perfect, and moved without a hitch in
all its bearings. They don't see that every existing institution just
bristles with difficulties--and that the difficulties are met or got
over somehow. Often enough while they swallow the camel of existing
abuses they strain at some gnat which they fancy they see flying in at
the window of Utopia or of the Millennium. "If your reform were
carried," they say in effect, "we should, doubtless, get rid of such and
such flagrant evils; but the streets in November would be just as muddy
as ever, and slight inconvenience might be caused in certain improbable
contingencies to the duke or the cotton-spinner, the squire or the
mine-owner." They omit to note that much graver inconvenience is caused
at present to the millions who are shut out from the fields and the
sunshine, who are sweated all day for a miserable wage, or who are
forced to pay fancy prices for fuel to gratify the rapacity of a handful
of coal-grabbers.

Lack of imagination makes people fail to see the evils that are; makes
them fail to realise the good that might be.

I often fancy to myself what such people would say if land had always
been communal property, and some one now proposed to hand it over
absolutely to the dukes, the squires, the game-preservers, and the
coal-owners. "'Tis impossible," they would exclaim; "the thing wouldn't
be workable. Why, a single landlord might own half Westminster! A single
landlord might own all Sutherlandshire! The hypothetical Duke of
Westminster might put bars to the streets; he might impede locomotion;
he might refuse to let certain people to whom he objected take up their
residence in any part of his territory; he might prevent them from
following their own trades or professions; he might even descend to such
petty tyranny as tabooing brass plates on the doors of houses. And what
would you do then? The thing isn't possible. The Duke of Sutherland,
again, might shut up all Sutherlandshire; might turn whole vast tracts
into grouse-moor or deer-forest; might prevent harmless tourists from
walking up the mountains. And surely free Britons would never submit to
_that_. The bare idea is ridiculous. The squire of a rural parish might
turn out the Dissenters; might refuse to let land for the erection of
chapels; might behave like a petty King Augustus of Scilly. Indeed,
there would be nothing to