This final chapter depicts the complete transformation (not only in name) from Animal Farm to Manor Farm. There will never be a "retirement home" for old animals (as evidenced by Clover), and the pigs come to resemble their human oppressors to the degree that "it was impossible to say which was which."
The completion of the second windmill marks not the rebirth of Snowball's utopian vision, but a further linking of the animals and humans: Used not for a dynamo but instead for milling corn (and thus making money), the windmill's symbolic meaning has (like everything else) been reversed and corrupted. Animal Farm is now inexorably tied to its human neighbors in terms of commerce and atmosphere.
Orwell has years pass between Chapters 9 and 10 to stress the ways in which the animals' lack of any sense of history has rendered them incapable of judging their present situation: The animals cannot complain about their awful lives, since "they had nothing to go upon except Squealer's lists of figures, which invariably demonstrated that everything was getting better and better." As Winston Smith, the protagonist of Orwell's Nineteen-Eight-Four understands, the government "could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event it never happened." This same phenomena occurs now on Animal Farm, where the animals cannot recall there ever having been a way of life different from their present one and, therefore, no way of life to which they can compare their own. Although "Beasts of England" is hummed in secret by some would-be rebels, "no one dared to sing it aloud." The pigs have won their ideological battle, as the Party wins its war with Winston's mind at the end of Nineteen-Eight-Four. Only Benjamin — a means by which Orwell again voices his own opinion of the matter — is able to conclude that "hunger, hardship, and disappointment" are the "unalterable law of life."
