Decency

Orwell's emphasis on the reciprocal relation between politics (taking that term as broadly as possible) and language is crucial to nearly all of his work, not just one essay.  It leads to or is the product of -- there is no determining which is cause and which is effect -- his highest value, decency.  In a world in which injustice is inevitable and in which, therefore, revolution is certain to be futile, producing only "a temporary relief, such as a sick man gets by turning over in bed" (vol. 4, p. 36), decency in all dealings with others is the highest form of political action; it is also a moral obligation and a psychic necessity.  As an idea it may seem thin and simple, especially to people with any degree of intellectual sophistication, but as a guide to action it is powerful and demanding, the Protestant equivalent of Silone's Catholic ideal of a sacramental sense of communion in daily life.  As a theme for art it is durable and effective.  One could take as an epigraph for Orwell's work, perhaps especially for the four volumes of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, a sentence that he wrote in a book review in 1936:  "The fact to which we have to cling, as to a life-belt, is that is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive" (vol. 1, p. 256).  The extraordinary achievement of the essays is that it is impossible to read them without believing that the "fact" is indeed a fact." 
(Comic Vision, Ch. 6, "Comedy and Injustice," pp. 173-4)