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.
Thes
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