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cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be
natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work
at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty,
they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of
home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up
the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police
moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals
who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the
ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was
required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make
them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they
sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it
on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of proles
did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very little. There
was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes,
drug-peddlers, and racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the proles themselves, it
was of no importance. In all questions of morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The
sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was
permitted. For that matter, even religious worship would have been permitted if the proles had shown any
sign of needing or wanting it. They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it:  Proles and animals
are free.
Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicose ulcer. It had begun itching again. The thing
you invariably came back to was the impossibility of knowing what life before the Revolution had really
been like. He took out of the drawer a copy of a children s history textbook which he had borrowed from
Mrs Parsons, and began copying a passage into the diary:
In the old days (it ran), before the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that we know
today. It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds
and thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children no
older than you had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters who flogged them with whips if they
worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water.
But in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in
by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them. These rich men were called capitalists.
They were fat, ugly men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture on the opposite page. You can see
that he is dressed in a long black coat which was called a frock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a
stovepipe, which was called a top hat. This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no one else was allowed
to wear it.
The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the
land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw them
into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a
capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as  Sir . The chief of all the
capitalists was called the King. And&
But he knew the rest of the catalogue. There would be mention of the bishops in their lawn sleeves, the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]