If he is entitled to be called “the conscience of his generation,” this is mainly because of his identification with the poor. He was not unique in tearing the mask off Stalinism, and his relentless pursuit of Stalinists in his own milieu occasionally seems to be a mere product of personal dislike. The rigors of his life, his unswerving rectitude entitled him to assume the duties of a purifying scavenger. Nobody could say that Orwell had been corrupted or would ever be corrupted by money, honors, women, pleasure; this gave him his authority, which sometimes, in my opinion, he abused. His political failure—despite everything, it was a failure if he left no fertile ideas behind him to germinate—was one of thought. While denouncing power-worship in just about everybody and discovering totalitarian tendencies in Tolstoy, Swift (the Houyhnhnms have a totalitarian society), and in gentle local anarchists and pacifists, he was in fact contemptuous of weakness—ineffectually—in political minorities. Apparently he did not consider how socialism, if it was to be as radical and thorough-going as he wished, could secure a general accord or whether, failing such an accord, it should achieve power by force.