News from Nowhere and Other Writings

It was now about middle of the afternoon, warm rather than hot, and quite windless; the clouds high up and light, pearly white, and gleaming, softened sun’s burning, but did not hide the pale blue in most places, though they seemed to give it height and consistency; the sky in short, looked really like a vault, as poets have sometimes called it, and not like mere limitless air, but a vault so vast and full of light that it did not opress the spirits.

‘It is clear from all that we have hear and read, that in the last age of civilization men had got into a vicious circle in the matter of production of wares. They have reached a wonderful facility they had gradually created a most elaborate system of buying and celling, which has been calle the world market; and that world market, once set a-going, forced them to go on making more and more of these wares, whether they needed them or not. So that while they could not free themselves from toil of making real necessaries, they created in a never-ending series sham or artificial necessaires, which became, under the iron rule of the aforesaid world-market, of equal importance to them with real necessaries which supported life. By all this they burdened themselves with a prodigious mass of work merely for the sake of keeping their wretched system going.’

The earth is a paradise, though marred by tears and death.

‘You can lose a man like that by your own death,’ wrote Bernard Shaw, ‘but not by his.’