I propose, subject to the patience of the reader, to devote two or
three articles to prophecy. Like all healthy-minded prophets, sacred and
profane, I can only prophesy when I am in a rage and think things look
ugly for everybody. And like all healthy-minded prophets, I prophesy in
the hope that my prophecy may not come true. For the prediction made by
the true soothsayer is like the warning given by a good doctor. And the
doctor has really triumphed when the patient he condemned to death has
revived to life. The threat is justified at the very moment when it is
falsified. Now I have said again and again (and I shall continue to say
again and again on all the most inappropriate occasions) that we must
hit Capitalism, and hit it hard, for the plain and definite reason that
it is growing stronger. Most of the excuses which serve the capitalists
as masks are, of course, the excuses of hypocrites. They lie when they
claim philanthropy; they no more feel any particular love of men than
Albu felt an affection for Chinamen. They lie when they say they have
reached their position through their own organising ability. They
generally have to pay men to organise the mine, exactly as they pay
men to go down it. They often lie about the present wealth, as they
generally lie about their past poverty. But when they say that they
are going in for a “constructive social policy,” they do not lie. They
really are going in for a constructive social policy. And we must go in
for an equally destructive social policy; and destroy, while it is still
half-constructed, the accursed thing which they construct.