ABSTRACT
We wish we could introduce Mr. Willianl Morris, the poet, to Mr. William Morris, the political revolutionist, between whom there has long been alienation. The one might learn a great deal from the other. The author of the lectures printed under the title of the Signs of Change would find his dreams-half idyllic, half bloodthirsty-rebuked in advance by the more truly inspired wisdom of the poem the title of which, by a happy irony, he appends to his name at the front of this work. Mr. Morris, like the wanderers whose illusions and sufferings and failure he told in noble verse, has himself set out in search of an earthly paradise. Like them, having passed through much affliction, he would find, if he had his way, that he had arrived at a place very different from that of his dreams. He might find himself in an earthly inferno. 'So,' as a poet he knows sings, 'with the failing of our hoped delight, we grew to be like devils.' Mr. Morris, in the volume before us, describes a state of things which does not exist, and proposes, as a cure for it, a state of things which could not possibly exist. With a certain artistic sense, in which he is not likely to be wanting, he darkens his picture of the present in order to heighten the charms of the dream of the future which he displaysbefore his own duped vision. He writes as if the disclosureswhich have been made before the Lords' Committee on the sweating system gave a true picture of our industrial organisation, though they really apply only to four trades subject to very special conditions.
