These and their parasites dwelt together, the
rich starving the poor and the poor plundering and misgoverning the rich;
and it was the intolerable suffering in the cities that chiefly hastened
the fall of the old Accumulation and the rise of the commonwealth.
"Almost from the moment of the Evolution the competitive and monopolistic
centres of population began to decline. In the clear light of the new
order it was seen that they were not fit dwelling-places for men, either
in the complicated and luxurious palaces where the rich fenced themselves
from their kind, or in the vast tenements, towering height upon height,
ten and twelve stories up, where the swarming poor festered in vice and
sickness and famine. If I were to tell you of the fashion of those cities
of our egoistic epoch, how the construction was one error from the first,
and every correction of an error bred a new defect, I should make you
laugh, I should make you weep. We let them fall to ruin as quickly as they
would, and their sites are still so pestilential, after the lapse of
centuries, that travelers are publicly guarded against them. Ravening
beasts and poisonous reptiles lurk in those abodes of the riches and the
poverty that are no longer known to our life.
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