The utilitarian, competitive ethic he now saw as the ethic of Cain; he always known that it murdered art, he had come to understand that it murdered man's dignity as a creator in his daily labour, he now discovered that it could murder mankind. He spoke in a lecture of 'the strength of that tremendous organisation under which we live .... Rather than lose anything which really is its essence, it will pull the roof of the world down upon its head'. He was consumed with the urgency of the socialist propaganda. If capitalism were not to be displaced by a clear-sighted constructive revolutionary movement, if it were to end in mere deadlock and blind insurrection, then 'the end, the fall of Europe, may be long in coming, but when it does, it will be far more terrible, far more confused and full of suffering than the period of the fall of Rome'.