

                                 William Morris

                             News from Nowhere, or

                                An Epoch of Rest

                  Being Some Chapters from an Utopian Romance

                                   Chapter I

                                        

                               Discussion and Bed

Up at the League, says a friend, there had been one night a brisk conversational
discussion, as to what would happen on the Morrow of the Revolution, finally
shading off into a vigorous statement by various friends of their views on the
future of the fully-developed new society.
    Says our friend: Considering the subject, the discussion was good-tempered;
for those present being used to public meetings and after-lecture debates, if
they did not listen to each other's opinions (which could scarcely be expected
of them), at all events did not always attempt to speak all together, as is the
custom of people in ordinary polite society when conversing on a subject which
interests them. For the rest, there were six persons present, and consequently
six sections of the party were represented, four of which had strong but
divergent Anarchist opinions. One of the sections, says our friend, a man whom
he knows very well indeed, sat almost silent at the beginning of the discussion,
but at last got drawn into it, and finished by roaring out very loud, and
damning all the rest for fools; after which befell a period of noise, and then a
lull, during which the aforesaid section, having said good-night very amicably,
took his way home by himself to a western suburb, using the means of travelling
which civilisation has forced upon us like a habit. As he sat in that
vapour-bath of hurried and discontented humanity, a carriage of the underground
railway, he, like others, stewed discontentedly, while in self-reproachful mood
he turned over the many excellent and conclusive arguments which, though they
lay at his fingers' ends, he had forgotten in the just past discussion. But this
frame of mind he was so used to, that it didn't last him long, and after a brief
discomfort, caused by disgust with himself for having lost his temper (which he
was also well used to), he found himself musing on the subject-matter of
discussion, but still discontentedly and unhappily. »If I could but see a day of
it,« he said to himself; »if I could but see it!«
    As he formed the words, the train stopped at his station, five minutes' walk
from his own house, which stood on the banks of the Thames, a little way above
an ugly suspension bridge. He went out of the station, still discontented and
unhappy,
