| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Old Indian Legends by Zitkala-Sa: "If you put us on to boil," said the Fish, "there will be
trouble."
"Ho ho!" laughed the village folk. "We shall see."
And so they made a fire.
"I have never been so angered!" said the Fish. The Turtle in
a whispered reply said: "We shall die!"
When a pair of strong hands lifted the Fish over the
sputtering water, he put his mouth downward. "Whssh!" he said. He
blew the water all over the people, so that many were burned and
could not see. Screaming with pain, they ran away.
"Oh, what shall we do with these dreadful ones?" they said.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome: MacDonald is not a Marxist in any sense of the word, but
he is at least interested in theory, and can therefore be
trusted to do his best to understand what is happening here.
More than that we do not ask."
We then talked a little on a subject that interests me very
much, namely, the way in which insensibly, quite apart
from war, the Communist theories are being modified in the
difficult process of their translation into practice. We
talked of the changes in "workers' control," which is now a
very different thing from the wild committee business that
at first made work almost impossible. We talked then of
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