A long building. A dim lantern swings in the wind above the gates, and the yellow spot of its light dances on the board nailed to them.

A man exhausted by hunger, damp and enforced idleness, dirty and bedraggled, comes up to that board in the night and reads:

‘Anyone who is shelterless, hungry or in need of medical assistance, come right in. The doors are open day and night.’

The man reads this and walks on. He walks past libraries, art galleries, charitable institutions, museums – past everything that has been gained by centuries of suffering for his happiness, and makes his way to the Thames, above which tower majestically the patterned Houses of Parliament.

There he stands, his teeth rattling, looking long into the distance, to the other bank of the river, where a thousand factory chimneys noisily spew forth red masses of fire into the empty sky – also in the name of his human happiness.

And as if in mockery of all these caring institutions, the following morning his cold blue corpse is dragged from the Thames, no longer in need of any acts of Parliament, any workhouse charity, or any thundering of factory wheels.

What does this mean?

A liberal-minded man would find it easy to explain all this in approximately the following way:

The pauper did not go to the workhouse because anyone who makes use of the hospitality of such a house loses his right to vote. And a Briton values his right to vote so highly that he would rather part with his life than with that.

As for Parliament, it proved unable to keep the suicidal man from taking his life because it failed to pass this or that law. (The liberal man even knows which ones.)

And so on. It turns out that you only need to change one or two screws in the huge machinery of state, and all will be well in this green isle. That is why the people here only ever trouble themselves about these screws, and it never occurs to them to think of destroying the machinery and replacing it with a new one. An Englishman – in the words of the poet –