“DAWNWARDS:” AN AUSTRALIAN DIALOGUE.

INTRODUCTION.

Horace Gildea was the grandson of one of those self-reliant energetic men of the English upper Middle-class, who at an early period of life conceive a particular ambition, and devote themselves wholly to the successful achievement of it. Edward Gildea, the man in question, desired, or we may even say intended, to possess both wealth and position, and he was, as the expression goes, still young (between forty and fifty years of age, that is) when his intentions were fulfilled. A baronetcy was conferred on him by a grateful Conservative government: his marriage with the only daughter of Lord Mainwaring had already brought him a considerable amount of landed property; and now, having bought more, he retired from the troublous and busy world to the “easeful dignity” of the life of a rich and respected English country magnate. Our Aristocracy is adaptive (here, indeed, lies its strength, as compared, for instance, with that of France): it will enrol among its members of to-day an outgrowth of the Middle-class, upper and lower, professional or trading, with the same ready complacency with which it enrolled among its members of yesterday the offspring of some poor royal amour or other; and this is not surprising, when we perceive how little difference there is, intellectually speaking, between the three classes. The aristocratic ideal in England does not, or did not, soar much higher than grouse to shoot, land to shoot them on, and savoury cooking to eat them with; and the aristocratic ideal is, with slight modifications, the ideal of the country at large. In one generation the Gildeas were counted among, what is called, the best people. The two sons of Sir Edward were educated at public schools and Oxford and Cambridge, and passed, the one into parliament, the other into the Diplomatic-service, where neither distinguished themselves. Horace Gildea, too, an only child, was sent to a public school and Oxford, and with the same result. At Oxford, however, although he did nothing more, educationally, than take his degree, he did not spend his time in mere amusement. Thanks to the friendship of Sir James Gwatkin, the well-known æsthetic critic, Gildea learned to appreciate the delights of that wonderful modern production which we call Culture. He had sufficient knowledge of Greek and Latin to enter into the spirit of their art and poetry, and he learned French, German, and Italian in the pleasant sexual manner prescribed by Byron. He travelled more or less all over Europe, “living and loving largely,” but (unlike Byron) saved from that excess whose inevitable fruit is satiety, by the talisman with which Sir James had dowered him. Gildea had, too, what the Romans called curiositas. The merely physical ideal of the English viveur did not satisfy him: he used to say that, if he was to be a blackguard, he should like to be a fine blackguard, and how can you be a fine blackguard if you know nothing but what can be known by any fool that can pay for it?

Several years after the death of his father, Gildea, living a life of considerable enjoyment between the pleasures of the countries and the capitals of Europe, began to perceive that, after all, his talisman was not omnipotent: it could not lay, it could only distance, that ancient spectre which he now for the first time learned to face, if not to dread, Satiety. At this point, however, Fortune, whose child he seemed, came to the rescue: he fell in love. The best definition of love is, perhaps, the care of someone else more than yourself, and (the passionate would add) than anything. Gildea, then, did indeed fall in love; but as his care for himself or for anything was not very great, it cannot be said that he fell in love deeply. But Fortune, having given him a spell with which to once more distance the ancient spectre, now deserted him. The lady he loved did not love him in return: her friendship—and friendship from so sweet and passionate a nature as hers was of a somewhat intense character, partaking more of the warm sunlight than the clear moonlight—her friendship she eagerly gave to him, but her love was, past recall, given to someone else. On the day on which he first realized this, Gildea, who had hoped otherwise, left England in his little yacht the “Petrel,” alone. He had intended visiting the east with her, returning by Naples, Rome, and Paris, with many sweet years, nomadic or otherwise, in the radiant future. Now he was quite careless where he went: for the first time in his life he knew what it was to feel miserable. The loss of this woman was a loss from himself. He felt a void in his soul, in his future. “And yet,” he used to tell himself, “she was not ‘the twin soul that halved my own:’ we should not have made perfect lovers, passionate, deep, abiding! None the less do I—or did I—long for her. She is the most beautiful soul I have yet seen, or probably shall ever see. Who would not straightway go and sell all that he had to possess her?—and willingly chance the rest!”

A violent storm caught the “Petrel” as she was about halfway down the Bay of Biscay, and hurried her past Gibraltar. When Gildea perceived this, and was asked by his skipper if they should put back, he kept silence for a moment. Then, looking up with an amused smile, said:

“No, Barry. We’ll go straight on to Madeira for provisions—from thence to St. Helena, and then double the Cape and make for Australia.”

Gildea had not been to Australia: it was one of the few places in the world to which he had not been. He might, he thought now, as well go there as anywhere. Several things in Australia interested him, and this was enough reason to make him, in his present state, care to go.

One bright, showery november afternoon, then, the “Petrel” passed Port Phillip Heads: was piloted up the harbour to Port Melbourne pier, and Gildea disembarked. He knew one person in Melbourne, and only one, Charles Maddock. Maddock, and his father before him, had been friends of the Gildea family. Maddock was some fifteen years older than Gildea, whom he had known well as a boy at Katharinasbury, he himself at that time being in the midst of his brilliant scholastic career at Cambridge. Almost immediately after his ordination, Maddock came out to a high ecclesiastical position in Australia. It had been the wish of his life to work in one of the Pacific Colonies, and now his wish was fulfilled. The appointment of one so young to the post he had at first held, had caused a little murmuring both at home and in the Colony, it being known that he was possessed of the highest influence; but the murmuring had soon passed into pleasant greeting, and was now swelled to a regular chorus of applause from friends, foes, and indifferent alike. Maddock had great charm of manner: he was a more or less refined scholar, yet was not lacking in that spiritual robustness which goes so far to make up what is called a personality. It would not be too much to say that he was the most popular man in the colony. Society delighted in the gentleman: the outer world in the man, and both were right, for (here was the secret!) he sympathized with both.

Gildea on his arrival took up his abode at an hotel until he saw rooms that pleased him, and began, after his fashion, to examine the city and its inhabitants. He went everywhere and saw everything, happy to find that his curiositas was not after all dead in him. Pleasure, in the sense of living, is in Melbourne but, what Tennyson says of the pleasure of London, “gross mud-honey,” and had not much attraction to one who had been through the best specimens thereof in London, Paris, New York, and Vienna. Gildea, however, if he did not go through it here, mingled with it as an amused half-spectator half-actor, seeking out its meaning as regards this dawning civilization which was interesting him just at present. He fell in with Sydney Medwin, a squatter’s son and ex-Cambridge undergraduate, whom he had known by repute as an inter-university runner and would-be rake, and they spent some pleasant days together. Medwin’s father wished him to take to station work, but Medwin, having tasted the “gross mud-honey” of London, Paris, and the Continent generally, was doggedly determined to do no such thing.

“Damn it all,” he said once in his half-acute way to Gildea, “there’s quite enough money made already in the family, and now it’s time to spend it. If my governor had wanted me to look after sheep, he shouldn’t have sent me to Europe.”

Europe was to Medwin—to Medwin held down by his inexorable “governor” to an allowance and a place in the home establishment—a sort of far-off beautiful dream which had once to a certain extent been his and, he feared, would never be his again. His life was reckless: he was knowingly doing his best to spoil a fine constitution by his excesses, and looked forward to death within ten or fifteen years with stupid stoicism.

After a little Gildea thought that he would like to see something of colonial society, social and intellectual, and presented himself to Maddock. Maddock knew the Medwins well, and even Sydney Medwin who, in his unreflective way, had a great respect for him.

“The governor,” Medwin said once to Gildea, “the governor has ruined my life! I had an ambition—I was ambitious; yes, I was ambitious! But I had to keep it dark! I can’t argue about it, you know: I haven’t thought for years, and now I can’t. But if Christianity’s good enough for Maddock, it’s good enough for me. I believe in Maddock.”

Accordingly, whenever Maddock was to be met at the Medwins’, Sydney Medwin was to be seen listening attentively to everything the Doctor said, trying to think, trying to understand, the look of intelligence varying on his face with the look of puzzlement.

“A fuddled intelligence,” said Gildea once, smiling and laughing; “now he’ll be off and get drunk with one of his girls at Dicks’.” (Dicks’ was a private hotel where “the set,” as Medwin and his friends called themselves, often met for the purposes of recreation.)

Maddock was very pleased to meet Gildea again, and during the next month they saw much of each other. Gildea mingled with the Colonial society as he had mingled with the outer world, but with less interest. The Colonial outer world is at any rate original: it does not imitate, it is. Colonial society, on the other hand, imitates and imitates badly. It is a case of the new wine in the old bottles. The young people wish to break away from all the old social convenances and bien-séances: they have almost a contempt for the old people; but the old people rule, and their rule is as yet too strong to be openly disobeyed. The young people, therefore, lack social self-reliance: they have no distinctive “style” of their own as in America. “Indeed,” as Medwin used to say, “no one has any style out here, except the people at Government House.—And they,” he would add, admiringly, “look down upon us all as louts.” The young people, then, feel their ideas of happiness to be frail, immature: pleasure is not, as in the European capitals, provided for them; they must provide it for themselves. Pleasure, however, is their aim, and pleasure, so soon as they rule in their turn, they will have. The question is whether this pleasure is to be “mud-honey”—“mud-honey” with its grossness drained somewhat, but still “mud-honey”—or whether that wonderful modern production which we call Culture is going to intervene and complicate matters.

Gildea soon wearied of a society in such a painful state of transition. Having arrived at these conclusions on its tendencies, or what he took to be its tendencies, the painfulness of it began to afflict him. At the same time his interest in the problem of this small social hot-house did not, somewhat to his surprise, show signs of leaving him.

One evening, at a large ball, he had been dancing and talking with a singularly bright and intelligent girl, who had pleased him by herself expressing her consciousness of this state of social transition of theirs, and ascribing the true reasons for it. They sat out several dances together, he enjoying her talk as that of a clever child, she with her woman’s vanity pleased to be monopolizing the most distinguished man in the room, and also glad of his mental appreciation of her. He half lay in a low chair beside her, looking at her with smiling eyes and smiling lips, amused. She was a little excited, just enough to give extra brilliance to her words and acts. She was not speaking to him alone: she was aware of the audience of guests, all of whom, she felt, were noticing her, and some catching parts of the conversation. He, who read her soul as if it were transparent, became more and more amused as she proceeded, and by an occasional movement helped her out with the impression he saw she wished to give her friends, namely, that he was more or less entranced by her. The thought of taking her to Paris and introducing her to its society, of watching her intense capacities of social pleasure expanding there in their natural atmosphere, occurred to him and pleased him. He had arrived at that spiritual state when much of our pleasure is in watching the pleasure of other people.

“Well,” he said at last, “and do you not find yourself lonely here, with all these wonderful ideas of yours, Miss Shepherd? All the other Melbourne young ladies do not, surely, participate in them?”

She was not quite sure for a moment whether he was mocking at her or not; but, looking at his face, decided in the negative.

“Yes,” she said, “I am lonely—rather. The other girls want to see things. They want to go to Europe—London, Paris, and all that. But they say it’s such a bother, and they’ve no memory. They don’t know what they want: they only know that they don’t want what they’ve got.—But I—,” she added, turning to him, and catching her lower lip lightly with her pretty visible teeth, one hand on her knee closing slightly.

“But you?”

“I want to—live!”

A pause.

“Ah,” he said, “that means that some day you will want to die.”

“I daresay! But I shall have lived first!—This Melbourne is just waking up. I wish, O I wish I had not come into it till it was awake!”

“You would like to go to Paris, then?”

“Paris!” (She stopped breathing.)—“O that,” she said, looking at him again, “is simply heaven!”

“How do you know that, Miss Shepherd?”

“Oh, I have read it! I have read all Alphonse Daudet’s novels, and a lot of Balzac’s.”

As Gildea strolled through the warm night streets, smoking a cigar, he thought of her again for a moment, and laughed to himself.

“The one Parisienne I have met out of Paris,” he said to himself, “She is of the tribe of the fine steel-pearl mangeuses who rend life with their dear little white teeth for the pleasure of rending. She should have been born in a concierge’s lodge, with a future in ermine—and the Morgue. And yet she is better than the mere mangeuse: she has intelligence. She has to thank Australia for that. For a month, or even two, she would be supportable—but the “Petrel” would take three to get her to Naples, perhaps, and it would be more trouble to loose her and let her go then than now.”

He had been strolling about the streets for more than an hour. He was not quite sure where he was. He stopped for a moment to look about him. A short well-moulded figure in a close dress and a poke bonnet passed him and turned down a narrow street ten or twelve yards ahead. He threw away his cigar.

“Janet,” he said to himself, “sweet child! And she recognized me and went on.”

Janet, a Salvation Army “lass,” going down into the Little Bourke Street slums had indeed recognised him. The figure of a man, in a light overcoat open in front showing that he was in evening dress, was remarkable enough, to have attracted anyone’s attention there. She had looked up for a moment: caught a glimpse of his face and, with a wild throbbing heart and quivering lips, hurried by, and on, and away. Gildea’s investigations into the social condition of the place had made him many unexpected friends. Here was one who was something more than a friend, a lover, and he knew it.

“I am sick of it,” he said to himself, almost bitterly, “I will go away. I want change.”

At about five o’clock that morning Sir Horace Gildea was rowed aboard of the “Petrel,” which passed out of the Heads a little after one, and turned to the east, making for Sydney.

I.

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning of a day late in april. The sun shone with bright warmth, a fresh breeze blowing in from the sea. Great deep masses of cloud, luminous-white or here and there shaded with that slaty black which denotes incipient rain, were moving in the blue vault of the heavens. Gildea was descending the steps of the entrance to St. Mary’s Cathedral, accompanied by a young man of about his own age. At the foot of the steps they both paused.

“Well,” said Gildea with a look, “You will be at my rooms in time for lunch, you say?”

The other nodded, and, in a few moments, saluting one another with a movement of the hand, they parted. The young man went with a quick firm step in the direction of St. James’ Church, while Gildea sauntered across the road into the Domain. He was thinking of the young man, Francis Fitzgerald, a young Jesuit whom he had met years ago at a seaside place in the south of France, and who, as he said, for the sake of his health, had come out on a voyage to Australia.

“It is wonderful,” said Gildea to himself, “how quickly and thoroughly the religious bodies are waking up to the intellectual necessities of the time. Romans—Anglicans—Lutherans, and even Calvinists are sucking lustily at the two paps of the Modern Spirit which we call Science and Culture. It is the instinct of self-preservation. If they do not suck they will starve. But ah, how many of us are cross-tempered enough to prefer to starve rather than imbibe the milk of a cross-tempered mother!” He looked up with a fine smile, suddenly realizing his humour of thought. “I am quite serious,” he said to himself, the smile deepening and broadening, lighting up his face with amusement, “which shows how adaptive I am. Really now, I listened to Fitzgerald’s hopes and beliefs in the future of Romanism with quite as much interest as if I were a Romanist myself. I can quite conceive of myself taking very considerable pains to forward a cause in which somebody else believed. This surely was the central idea of my attachment to Olivia Bruce? I used to think I should be quite satisfied to live the life of a poet in that of my poetess? So far, this power of living your own life in the life of one you love has been a female gift. And indeed I have often thought that I should have been better as a woman. I can quite imagine myself as Lady Bellfield or d’Israeli’s delightful Berengaria; whereas now, I am but an aimless wanderer on the face of an aimless planet, a pilgrim without a shrine.”

He walked on half-thoughtful half-amused, till he had crossed the Domain and found himself opposite the Picture Gallery and the Botanical Gardens. He entered the gardens, and was proceeding down one of the walks when, some fifteen yards before him, he beheld a well-known figure. It was Maddock, Maddock standing at the side of the walk, observing a plant through his pince-nez with serene interest. Gildea came up to him with pleasure.

“Ah, Doctor,” he said, “you here! This is a surprise!”

They shook hands: greeted one another, and exchanged health notes both of themselves and Mrs. Maddock, as they went on down the walk together, the Doctor rubbing his glasses with his silk handkerchief and keeping step.

“The truth is, my dear fellow,” he said, his head up and moving from side to side as he drew into himself the enjoyment of the fine morning air and scene, “the truth is, I am here for a holiday—or rather, for half a holiday. Sydney is a favourite place of mine.—But,” he added in his humorous confidential way, “you know I don’t care for the people! They are not in earnest enough! I would sooner, I believe, have an earnest atheist than a lukewarm orthodox man. Isn’t it your friend Renan who says somewhere, that the atheist has an idea of things, a quite inadequate idea, it is true, but still an idea, whereas ‘the average sensual man’ has none?—or something to that effect.”

“Yes,” said Gildea, “he says so; and he adds elsewhere that ‘atheism is one sense the grossest of anthropomorphisms. The atheist sees justly that God does not act in this world after the manner of man; hence he concludes that he does not exist; he would believe if he beheld a miracle—in other words, if God acted as a finite force with a determinate object in view.’”

“That is good,” said Maddock, “I did not give Renan credit for saying such a thing.”

“No,” said Gildea, “you have never got much further in Biblical criticism than the Germans. Strauss satisfies you as the great Against, and poor Westcott as the gigantic For!”

They both laughed.

“Come, come,” said Maddock, “you must not poke fun at me!”

“It is impossible,” Gildea answered, “to poke fun at an ecclesiastic who calls Heine ‘a great poet and brilliant philosopher.’”

“Ah, you have been reading my last polemic, I see?—Yes, you must have been reading it; for no newspaper man would ever think of quoting an opinion like that.”

“I have been reading it with admiration and wonder: admiration at its excellence as polemical work, and wonder that you should take the trouble to castigate a production which you yourself declare to be, as a contribution to theological knowledge, utterly useless.”

“Yes, but did I not explain myself? The book is fundamentally vicious. It confirms the shallow heterodox in their heterodoxy, the shallow orthodox in their orthodoxy. It gives forth light to no one and darkness to everyone. Progress in foolishness and stupidity, that is all that it signalises; the foolishness of ‘go-aheadism,’ the stupidity of re-action. I have no patience with a man of presumable intelligence who could write such a book.”

“But do you not think that your attack on it will only, by bringing it into public notice, increase its powers of mischief?”

“I hope not. I hope that I have sufficiently laid bare its gross ignorance of the subject of which it treats to bring it into that contempt whose fruit is oblivion.”

“In England—in London or in any country or capital where there is a large intellectual life—this might be so. But am I not right, Doctor, in believing that this Victorian Melbourne of yours is a place where pure intellectual life scarcely exists? You have the mass of intelligent money-makers who care, or who do not care, for things (I will not say religious but) sectarian. Then there are those who care for things political; but where will you find any number of men who aim at making their life the purely intellectual life? They are all partizans here. When, therefore, you attack a Rationalist like Judge Parker, all the Rationalists rally round him, just as the orthodox rally round you; and the result is, as the Argus says, a boxing match, wherein the great thing is to at all price shout down their man and shout up your own. Truth turns away in disgust from such an exhibition of blind deaf bawling partizanary. These men are not of the sort that are open to reason: you cannot lay bare to such as these the gross ignorance or perfect science of their champion; they will only hiss or applaud as you blame or praise him. I may be wrong: my observation of your so-called intelligent public, is, you know, necessarily but small.”

Maddock kept silence with rumpled brows. At last:

“I do not know,” he said, “that you are not, after all, to a large degree right. We are very narrow here. A thing done in the street is done in the city, and indeed in the whole country!”

“And am I not right in thinking that the only two native subjects, which are capable of arousing public interest and curiosity here, are those which appeal to the two portions of your mass of intelligent money-makers—things pertaining to business, and things sectarian?”

The Doctor suddenly regained his humour.

“Are,” he said, the deep humorous smile playing about his mouth, “are all the fashionable young men who come out here in yachts as acute observers as you, Sir Horace?—But I object to your word sectarian: you should say religious. I am quite ready to admit that (to put it as a Melbourne printer put it to me the other day) the only subject that will pay for book-printing here is Religion, and Religion, alas, in its polemical aspect. But I cannot look upon this, as you seem to do, as a great misfortune. I—I ... well, I may say candidly, that I rather like a bit of polemics now and then, and the shouts of the men round the ropes do not altogether disgust me, as of course” (his eyebrows went up) “they ought to do! No, I do not look upon that purely intellectual life of yours as by any means the ideal for us to aim at. It smacks too much of dilettantism for me!”

Gildea smiled.

“Dear Doctor,” he said, “we all know that you prefer a climate where the sky is not always a cloudless vault of blue insipidity. The sound and feel of a buffeting wind is pleasant to you. As I said just now, you prefer Strauss to Renan, and the good secular Saint Matthew Arnold finds small favour in your eyes. Now too that you are taking to science, I expect every day to hear you tell us Cuvier was a greater man than Darwin, and that Huxley is an impudent young amphioxus that has no place beside the dignity of our dear old behemoth, Owen.”

“Now I really won’t let you poke fun at me,” said the Doctor, “I really won’t! The next thing is, that you will be saying something rude about Professor Mosley and his “Ruling Ideas in Early Ages,” and scoffing at my idea of having some of his essays reproduced in our Daily Telegraph.”

“Oh no, Doctor, I will not do that. Even Mosley’s essays are better than the sermons of the local ecclesiastics.”

“You are very impudent,” said Maddock, his face all beaming, “to call me a local ecclesiastic! I shall have to get you to write a pamphlet on my review of ‘Religionless Religion,’ so as to be able to denounce you ex cathedra!”

“Well, I should very much like to do so, only ... you know my cowardice: I cannot write——”

“Even letters to your best friends, to explain that you have only gone off to sea at an hour’s notice, and are not, as they anxiously expected, drowned, or murdered and secreted in some hole in the slums.”

“I prostrated myself in apology to Mrs. Maddock.”

“Yes, in over a week! As for Dr. Maddock, of course such a casual acquaintance as he could not expect.... Ah, you are a quite too eccentric young man, Sir Horace! I wish you were well married, with a definite aim in life. Someday one of your wild freaks will end you, and then, what, what will have been the result of those great abilities with which God has gifted you?—Now,” proceeded the Doctor, “this is not an extract from the Daily Telegraph sermon corner, but only the expression of the affectionate anxiety of one who hopes you will allow him to call himself your true friend.”

Gildea kept silence for a moment. Talk of this sort only served to show him how completely his real inner view of things was unknown to his companion, and so the idea of making an answer did not occur to him: he felt how useless it would be. Then he genially thanked the Doctor for his friendship and its kind wishes, and added lightly:

“You ask what will be the result of, as you are pleased to say, those great abilities with which God has gifted me. The result (you perceive it) will be nothing; but, Doctor, what, let me ask you, in a hundred years will be the result of those great abilities with which God has gifted you? In the hundred and first year we shall start equal; and I, who have not a belief in a personal God and a personal immortality as you have, find the whole matter, I confess, rather absurd! This would not probably have been so always. If I had lived in the days when action indeed contained the highest stakes of life, I should have played for them; but, as it is, the highest stakes now belong to the thinker, the writer, and I—I cannot write ... even letters! I, like all my contemporaries, am more or less under the sad dominion of the perception of, what Leopardi calls, the ‘infinita vanità del tutto,’ but, unlike the best of them, I have no care for the only immortality we have left, the immortality of Art or Science. I think of the hundred, or thousand, or million and first year, and find myself smiling.”

Gildea was soliloquising, Maddock forgotten. He had, then, after all, drifted into making the answer, the idea of making which had, by reason of its clear uselessness, not occurred to him; and yet he had not made it to Maddock, but to himself. Maddock, indeed, did not altogether understand it, but the feeling of it, the belief that inspired it, he felt and hastened to reply to. He laid his hand gently on Gildea’s arm, bringing him to a pause, and said simply:

“Look!”

They had come down as far as Farm Cove—skirted it, turning off along Lady Macquarie’s Walk—then mounted up onto the drive, and, having passed by the Chair, were now standing on the brow of the slope with an open view of Garden Island (Clark Island being hidden), the harbour, and the woody hills behind it. Great deep masses of cloud, luminous-white or here and there shaded with that slaty black which denotes incipient rain, were moving in the blue vault of the heavens. Light and shade lay everywhere in alternate streaks or patches. One round piece of water to the left was like a burnished blazing mirror of steel. Other parts were blue, gray, or dark, reflecting the cloud-colours above them. The anchored ships rose and fell gently, their flags fluttering. A steamer came stealing out of one of the harbour arms into the open. The only sounds of life were the far-off hammer-strokes of the builders, the occasional cry of the white fleeting sea-gulls, the striking of a ship’s bells, the cricket humming at their feet.

“And,” Maddock said, in his deep voice of earnestness, “in the face of such a scene as this—the free glory of nature so great and so glad, the wonderful toil and effort and happiness of mankind—you will say to yourself: ‘There is no soul in me, for there is no God to give it!’ Ah, my dear Sir Horace, you surprise and grieve me! Are you not—you, oh heavens, you!—at heart an atheist? are you not guilty of that grossest of anthropomorphisms yourself?”

Gildea smiled, a fine sweet smile of sadness that made even the strong steady heart of his companion turn faint for a moment and sick. There was something so absolutely inevitably hopeless, as it seemed to Maddock, in this strange soul that he saw before him, now for the first time laid bare. Here was a patient for which the physician felt he had no power of healing or even alleviation. What view of christian faith and hope and love did not this strange soul know? Maddock, for the first time in his life, felt himself in the presence of one, the breadth and depth and height of whose spiritual experience encompassed him like an ocean. The words of remonstrance died on his lips: exhortation lay lifeless in him: silence and sorrow possessed him. He turned away with a heavy sigh, a sigh which was the unconscious acknowledgment to himself that life and death, time and eternity, man and God, could indeed be read in two diametrically different ways. For the first time in his life he realized the truth of “the Everlasting No” in a human soul greater than his own.

They walked on together for a little in silence. Then Gildea said as simply and naturally as if nothing unusual had happened:

“Now, Doctor, tell me will you come and have lunch with me? Mrs. Maddock, you say, has shaken you off for the sake of a long morning with Lady Whitfield, and why should you not retort on her spinster’s déjeuner with a bachelor’s lunch? I ought to have thought of it before.”

The Doctor again suddenly regained his humour.

“Thank you,” he said, “I shall be charmed.”

“Nay,” said Gildea, smiling, “but I must bid you pause a moment, aimless dreamer that I am, and tell you who you will meet there. Perhaps you will want your assent back again.”

“Speak on,” said Maddock, “and, provided it is not some one who will object to my smoking afterwards, I ... I don’t think I shall!”

“The guests, then, are three in number. Firstly, James Alcock, who, they tell me, is the most secular and scientific member of all the Australian Legislative Assemblies——”

“Go on,” said Maddock.

“Doctor,” Gildea said, “he reads Haeckel and swears by no other prophet of Science. Pause before it is too late. They say too that he sleeps every saturday and sunday with Mill “On Liberty” under his pillow, and all Spencer’s “Principles” strewed about the counterpane. He knew my father years ago in England, and his heart warms towards me as towards an incipient disciple.”

“Secondly—”

“Secondly, Francis Fitzgerald, a young man learned with all the learning of the Egyptians; a pilgrim and devotee at that simple west-England shrine which holds the Catholic pearl beyond all price, John Henry Newman; a scholar of the Parisian seminaries; a pupil of the inner Jesuit circle—”

“Thirdly—”

“Frank Hawkesbury, the young Australian poet; a Socialist, delighting in Trades-Unions, Religious Revivals (the Salvation Army is a hobby of his), and Secular Organizations with a grand impartiality! Nay, it is even whispered that he had dealings with Holden and the Irish and Continental Nihilists two years ago in London. Our friend Mrs. Medwin almost fainted when Sydney Medwin asked her if she would care to know him.”

“I have looked through one of the young man’s books of poems,” Maddock said, serenely, “and rather liked them. He is in earnest. Your lunch will be amusing.—It smacks to me,” he added, with a touch of grimness in his humour, “a little of those shows one sees now and then at the street-corners. They call them, I believe, happy families.”

Gildea laughed.

“Yes, Doctor,” he said, “but what if the animals should take to fighting? Alas, then, for the canaries and the mice, who will be worried and eaten by the dogs and the cats.”

“Which are who, or who are which?”

“Let us say that Alcock is a dog, and Fitzgerald a canary.”

“Then you, I suppose, are the mouse and I the cat? But what is your young Australian poet to be? You have left him out.”

“Oh, he will be a rabbit. You will see that he can burrow. It is the forte of Socialists, burrowing.—Now,” he proceeded, “we must go this way if we are to get to my rooms in time. And as we go, will you let me first express some tentative thoughts of mine, and then ask you a few questions about your friend Mr. Parker and yourself?”

“Ask on,” said Maddock, getting into step, “and I will do my best to answer you.”

II.

“It is about this little book of his,” Gildea said, with slow reflectiveness, “‘Religionless Religion.’ I found it interesting.”

“Indeed?” said Maddock, “As interesting as the production of your dear continental sceptics?”

“Well now,” Gildea said, in a tone that implied a certain amount of candour, “to tell, what the French call, the true truth, I was struck by several things both in it and in your reply to it. I thought that it would have been difficult to have found a more typical example of the average intelligent secular view of theological Christianity than that of our good Judge.”

“I agree with you, and that was one of the reasons that made me decide to attack it. It is typical.”

“And, therefore, to anyone who is, though only as an amateur, an observer of things contemporary, it is interesting. Its very deficiencies will be instructive. Well, what I want you to do, Doctor, if you will be so good, is to help me with your superior knowledge of the things treated of to arrive at the spiritual condition of the treater. Perhaps you will not find the attempt too uninteresting, or....” He paused with a movement of courtesy.

Maddock, who had a faint suspicion that Gildea was mocking, half grumbled out humorously:

“Go on, then! Qualify yourself as a psychologist, my dear fellow, and then we will have a plunge into social metaphysics. It is refreshing in a country where they are all partizans, and Matthew Arnold and the purely intellectual life are not appreciated. Sic itur ad astra. In the name of all the lucidities, forward!”

“In the first place, then, we have to notice, have we not, that the little book is polemical, which, at any rate to the amateur observer of things contemporary, detracts somewhat from its historical value; for, after all, is not a polemist, to a large extent a man who defends the delusions of his friends against the delusions of his enemies, and leaves Truth, like the proverbial pounds, to look after herself? But, if we always remember to take off a percentage for the polemics, we need not miss what it is that the polemist really means and feels?”

“Πως γαρ οὐ?” said Maddock.

“And the more easily, as our Parker is in earnest about, what he calls, ‘his most serious and difficult task.’”

“Forensic flourishes!”

“—In earnest as far as suits the disposition of a theistic polemist.”

“—Microscopically, that is to say. The lawyer’s, and especially the successful lawyer’s, habit of thought tends towards earnestness as the sparks fly downwards.”

“For the average lawyer’s habit of thought is perhaps the most typical example of the average intelligent secular view of things. Is it not the final fruit of what is called common-sense, that is to say of the sense of common people? Our good Judge more than once speaks of himself and his audience as “persons of ordinary common-sense,” as opposed to “metaphysicians,” and especially “ecclesiastical metaphysicians.” He wants clear solid statements which his mind can see, and as it were, touch and handle. He scoffs at all statements other than these, looking upon them as at bottom sophistical. It follows that, when he comes to criticise the Bible, he claims the right to criticise it, not only with the same spirit, but with the same manner, as he would criticise any other book. He will not only look at it straight, fearlessly, logically, but he will demand of its statements that they be clear and solid, that they bear the ordinary interpretation of ordinary statements. He will apply the same principles of examination to Moses and Jesus as he would do to Blackstone or Chitty. And all the secular persons of ordinary common-sense cry out: ‘Hear, hear!’”

“With the Judge,” said Maddock, “a metaphysician is a man who examines the Bible by the aid of principles other than those of one who is ignorant of all contemporary history save that which the Bible gives him.”

“The consequence of which is, that he is capable of such a statement as, that ‘without question early Christianity was far more free from paganism and from the taint of superstition than the Christianity of our own time,’ and others of a like force.”

“He has no notion whatever of the philosophy of history—of, what I call, the development of divine Truth.”

“And yet he is contradictory enough, while asserting the degradation of the Christian ideal, to lay much stress on the development of Divine truth in a civilization that has, till comparatively lately, been Christianic. Yes, he sees the development of divine Truth, but he does not understand the forms which that development has taken in Christianity. The Trinity—the Atonement—the Deity of Christ—are to him ‘mere crude superstitions which disfigure and obscure pure and true religion.’ It never seems to have occurred to him that, although these doctrines may be empty formulæ to him, they were and are passionate realities to others.”

“That is very true.”

“He will talk with the same ignorance of what he would call Jesuolatry as a Protestant will of what he calls Mariolatry, neither he nor the Protestant understanding any more of a deep spiritual truth than its cut-and-dried dogmatical letter.” The Doctor assented, though with a movement of slight qualification.

“We agree at starting, then, that his criticism as that of an historical Bible student does not exist. The authorities he quotes are, as you point out in your Reply, ludicrous. They culminate in his poor little some ‘celebrated Unitarian minister’ or other, than whom the habit of thought of the legal Biblical critic can, it is to be hoped, no further go! He is too, we agree, careless and superficial even in his own style, but we must not lay too much stress on individual cases of this in the face of his request for ‘indulgence’ for his ‘doubtless many imperfections here.’”

“When a man speaks publicly of such a grave matter as religion,” said Maddock, “he should not be careless, he should not be superficial! We have a right to demand of those who make explosives, that they, at any rate, do not smoke in the magazine.”

“True; but, if we all got our deserts, who, you know, should escape whipping? Certainly not the producers of orthodox religious literature.”—(The Doctor, after a pause, assented as before).—“Well, we will proceed further against our good Judge, and say that his appreciation of what is, as he says, ‘good and ennobling’ is ludicrously inadequate. What can be said of a man who seriously speaks of Jesus, ‘when, in the garden of Gethsemane, he went apart and prayed, three times over, the same prayer to God, within a short period,’—of Jesus thus ‘doing that which he told his disciples not to do—“use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do,” for the reason that your heavenly Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him.’ Habemus confitentem asinum! We can only burst out laughing: a reply to such a statement is impossible! The lawyer’s habit of thought is at its apogee, and (as Heine says) ‘Gegen die Dummheit kämpfen wir Götter selbst vergebens.’—Against stupidity the very gods themselves struggle in vain.” The Doctor assented smiling.

“And statements similar to this are not scarce here. Our good Judge, then, has not, it is clear, much experience of the spiritual life, of those who live in the spirit. The ‘sudden conversion of Paul,’ for instance, strikes him as one of the (it is supposed) ‘improbabilities so forcible that no sane thinking man or woman can accept’ the inspiration of the Scriptures which relate them. Now, any one who knows anything of human nature other than that of ‘persons of ordinary common-sense,’ knows that such ‘sudden conversions’ are not only not improbable, but passably frequent. In some cases, as in that of Staniforth, quoted by Arnold in his ‘St. Paul and Protestantism,’ the circumstances approach so closely to those of Paul’s that we are enabled to assign to them a definite place in the science of psychology. Nor are our good Judge’s ‘errors,’ as you say, exhausted yet. We have still to bring against him the charge of, what Celsus calls, κουφοτης, and Arnold translates ‘want of intellectual seriousness.’ So confused and incoherent is his knowledge of the real position that the secular biblical critic takes up, that he absolutely calls the position taken up by the orthodox biblical critic (that is to say, biblical critics who are orthodox; as, for instance, you yourself, my dear Doctor): he absolutely calls this position critically ‘untenable,’ not perceiving that it is his own only differing in degree!—This is simply appalling! The κουφοτης of the Secularists is not a whit better, after all, than that of the Christians!”

“Yes,” said Maddock, disregarding the last remark, “but then you must remember that the Judge ‘does not intend to resort to any process of subtle argument, nor to make any display of scholastic knowledge, nor to indulge in learned disquisitions.’ He merely writes ‘popular, clear, and simple’ nonsense for ‘the doubter who is trying to grope his way to the light, but cannot; to the Atheist who believes in nothing, neither in a Supreme Power, nor in a future life.’ And your secular ingratitude to him, Sir Horace, strikes me, I must confess, as keener-toothed than the winter wind of orthodoxy!”

“Doctor,” said Sir Horace, “you are poking fun at me! But I, who am, as Shelley said of himself ‘rather serious’—I proceed in my examination, whose sole confirmation as truth I find in your words or gestures of approval. You will, I hope, forgive me for any repetition I may make of your own criticism, as a master should a humble disciple? It is only a proof of attention and admiration.”

“Go on,” said Maddock, “mocker!”

“All these faults, then, which we have remarked in our good Judge—his polemically; his ignorance of the grammar (or, perhaps, as your Reply says, the alphabet) of historical criticism; his ludicrously inadequate conception of the good and the ennobling, of the spiritual calibre of such men as, for instance, St. Paul; his superficial acquaintance with the data of the subject of which it is treating; and, finally, his κουφοτης, his want of intellectual seriousness—all these faults, are we not agreed, are the faults of the average intelligent secular view, in its negative consideration of Christian Theology? The question that now arises is, has this view nothing but faults?—has it no excellencies? Does there remain, after the attack on it of so admirable a theological polemist as Dr. Maddock is, no residuum of real and vital truth? Let us try and see.—To begin with, did we not find that, despite a contradiction, our good Judge perceived the reality of, what you so finely call, the development of divine Truth?—

“No,” said Maddock, “I cannot grant him even that! A faint glimmering of a thing cannot be called a perception. Consider this very contradiction of his! Consider, again, his unspeakably gross and ignorant treatment of the Old Testament which he brands with blood-thirstiness and impurity. He works by a rule of thumb. The higher spiritual mathematics are mere names to him. He is—I must declare—too much of a blockhead to ever rise beyond the spiritual Rule of Three.”

“I agree to a large extent, dear Doctor; but you will admit, I think, that even the Rule of Three is not without its use, without its real and vital truth?”

“Not when the schoolboy cannot use it properly! I have pointed out, for example, that, in attacking the doctrine of the Divine Sonship, he only attacks a dummy doctrine of his own. Your schoolboy does not know which of the three is his third quantity! He wants, then, to be whipped and put onto the dunce’s stool—to encourage the others!” The Doctor spoke for the first time with a little testiness.

“Be it so,” Gildea said, “our good Judge is not to be allowed more than a faint glimmering of that fine theory of ours of the world’s unseen τελος. The ‘divine far-off event’ is not more than a fog-lamp to him, which he will not, then, mistake for the moon, or its light for moonshine. But that he is too much of a blockhead to even rise beyond the spiritual rule of thumb, the spiritual Rule of Three, seems to me, I confess, dear Doctor ... well, a rather strong statement. The average intelligent secular view of things is, is it not, less pedantic, less given to accepting the conventional value of things as their true value, than the average intelligent orthodox view? Are not, indeed, these tears a most convincing proof of it? Is it not just because our good Judge refuses, for instance, to accept the orthodox view of Jesus and of God that he wrote his little book, and you replied to it? Now the orthodox view of God is, if you will let me say so, excessively pedantic: it adheres to the expressions of a belief in which in its heart it does not believe at all. Parker’s criticism on this is excellent. ‘It is impossible,’ he says, ‘to lay down any definition of God which will even satisfy man’s conception of God.’ What, then, is the good, he asks, of holding up this ‘magnified non-natural man’ of yours, and asking me to fall down and worship it? Common-sense revolts against such an idea and common-sense, dear Doctor, is, will you not agree, for once right?”

“You surprise me, Sir Horace,” said Maddock. “Are you too going to spend your time and trouble in demolishing the survivals of verbal inspiration?”

“Certainly not! I am only trying to see wherein common-sense is a safe guide as a biblical critic. We are agreed, then,—you, that is, the Judge and I—that we must unite in opposing many of ‘the statements which,’ as the Judge says, ‘the orthodox are pleased to call evidence.’ Because, for instance (to continue with the Judge’s own words), ‘the fallible man Paul says in a letter to Timothy that the Scriptures were inspired, it does not make them so.’ We are agreed here?”

“We are agreed here,” said Maddock, with deliberation.

“Or again, to take another instance, when Matthew and Luke, for whatever purpose, strive in their genealogical tables ‘to give Jesus’ (I always use the Judge’s words) ‘a divine origin, conceived of a virgin by the Holy Ghost, and yet to connect him with David by making Joseph the natural father of Jesus.’—are we not here faced by two ideas which ‘no one short of an ecclesiastical metaphysician,’ or, as you say, a ‘very bad critic,’ would or could ‘reconcile?’—We are still agreed, of course.”

“We are still agreed—to a certain extent.”

“Nay, let us go further, then, and chime in with the Judge to the effect that ‘on far stronger evidence (if evidence it can be called) than that which supports’—let us say, almost all—‘of the events or miracles’ of the Scriptures, ‘the Roman Catholic Church propound to the world their miracles,’ which ‘the Protestant section of Christianity reject as incredulous.’”

“Proceed,” said Maddock.

“Nay, let us go further still, and notice how we no longer look on the Genesis account of the Creation as more than allegory, of the Flood as being strictly accurate; of the tower of Babel as, again, more than allegory, and so on in many other similar cases. And how in the same way we do not look upon the statements of Christ, and after him of the author of the ‘Revelations,’ of the close approach of the Apocalypse, as literal but only figurative. ‘The statement of Jesus,’ as the Judge puts it, ‘as to his coming again before the then generation have passed away does not mean that he will so come: ‘generation’ being merely used figuratively, but when he does come he is still to come in the clouds of heaven, and with great glory, sounds of trumpets, rushings of winds, and mourning of tribes; for’ (Gildea paused)—‘all this has not yet been falsified by the event.’ This is, I think, undoubtedly the conclusion at which common sense arrives, but common sense is of course wrong.”

“Common-sense is wrong,” said Maddock.

“Common-sense too, as exemplified in this its typical blockhead who cannot ever rise beyond the spiritual Rule of thumb and Three; common-sense observes of the development of divine Truth, as exemplified in the Christian theology of yesterday and to-day, that its ‘golden rule apparently is to adopt those interpretations’ of its Scriptures ‘which best satisfy the exigency of the particular position of the time being,’ and thus we have no further guarantee that the God of to-day will be the God of to-morrow than that the God of yesterday is certainly not the God of to-day. ‘Heaven forgive me,’ exclaims ‘that great poet and brilliant philosopher,’ Heine, ‘but I often feel as if the Mosaic God were but a reflected image of Moses himself.’ And we all remember with what contempt Taine speaks of this God of Christianity, revised and amended to suit the latest edition of scientific and historical discovery—rooted up out of the earth and momentary intercourse with man—driven out of the clouds and the occasional interposition of his strong right hand—spied and telescoped from the radiant bowers of the stars, and finally lodged out of sight, and all but out of mind, in the eternal infinitudes of Time and Space! After all, then, may not our good Judge have had, not of course a perception, but a faint glimmering, of sapience, when he spoke of the position taken up by the orthodox biblical criticism as critically ‘not only untenable, but absolutely suicidal?’ The thought is, as we agreed before, simply appalling. Spirits of Butler, Paley, Neander, Weiss, Westcott, Lightfoot, and many another mortal or immortal immortal, rise and thunder ‘No!’ When this exponent of the average secular intelligence declares that contemporary Theology is an impossible compromise between Reason and Absurdity; that the Protestant is quite inconsistent who with one face rejects ‘the events or miracles propounded by the Roman Catholic Church because they involve a violation or suspension of unvarying natural laws; because such things do not happen, and because reason refuses to give credence to them,’ and with another face accepts as truth the sojourn of Jonah in the belly of some sea-monster (at present conveniently extinct, even to the bones), or the communications of, what Gordon describes as,

rise, I say, and in Olympian accents demonstrate to him and his benighted audience, that these were but links ‘in the development of divine Truth,’ and that ‘one lesson at a time of this difficult kind was enough, and as history shows more than enough, for human weakness.’”

“You are a treacherous and malicious young man,” said Maddock, laughing in spite of himself, “and have no right to quote my words in such an irreverent and grotesque manner!”

“It is my orthodox ingratitude,” said Gildea, “—And yet,” he added suddenly, with a complete change of tone and manner, “in less than fifty years polemics like these will be looked upon as childish, and, those who spent their life and energy upon them, as we now look on the mediæval Schoolmen. It is a sad thought.”

Maddock was a little puzzled at these swift chameleon changes in his friend.

“And now,” said Gildea, looking up with yet another change of tone and manner, “and now we have done with the negative side of the good Judge’s criticism and can turn to the affirmative.—But that,” he added, “must, I am afraid, be after lunch—if you will, Doctor?”

“I will,” said Maddock, “and you shall not then find me so passive, for your treachery and malice are now quite laid bare to me.”

Gildea smiled.

“But not my loyalty and admiration? Believe me, Doctor, that, if it were only for this one remark of yours, I could never fail in my interest and gratitude to you. ‘Our blackfellows,’ you say, ‘had no punishment for offences against their elementary ideas of purity but spearing. And it was infinitely better that they should spear for impurity than lose their first step towards a higher life.’ ... But here we are,” he said, “This is the house. Fitzgerald and Hawkesbury have to leave us soon after lunch. Mrs. Medwin and her niece, Miss Medwin, are coming later to make tea for me, and then we are going out for a sail in the yacht. Mr. Medwin is thinking of a legislative career, and so Alcock is to be cultivated. Can you come with us? You know how pleased it would make us all.”

The Doctor explained that he was due at his hotel at half-past three to meet Mrs. Maddock, and both he and Gildea expressed their due regrets at his not being able to make one of the party on the yacht.

III.

Gildea led the way upstairs and ushered Maddock into the sitting-room. It was in reality two rooms joined together by a large folding-door, which was now thrown open and draped with four looped-up curtains, two of some dark-red material behind two of delicately-wrought muslin. The two rooms were of the whole depth of the house, the large bay-windows, open and with a glass-door in the middle of them open also, at one end looking out over the city, at the other over the harbour. A grass-slope, and a garden with flower-beds and rustling trees, spread all round and down to the water’s edge; while, a little way out, the “Petrel” rode at peaceful anchorage, her boat behind her. Maddock was for the moment so taken up with the beauty of the place within and without—the room with all its harmonies of form and colour, the garden and harbour scene—that he did not notice that someone was standing, half hidden by the curtains, in the next room on the hearth-rug. Then Gildea passed through and greeted this person whom he brought forward and introduced to Maddock as Mr. Hawkesbury.

Hawkesbury was a small but well-made man with a tendency to muscular leanness. His face was striking and interesting, and betrayed a strongly-defined individuality. At one moment he might have been called handsome, and his manner frank, free, and open: at another his features took such a contracted intensified look, and his movements were so nervously acute, that the whole man seemed to have suffered distortion. It seemed as if he were suddenly seized by some keen pain, spiritual and physical, and was being racked by it. When Gildea entered, there was for a moment a trace of this latter manner in Hawkesbury: his sensitive pride found something antagonistic in, what seemed to him, the consummate luxury which surrounded him and even in the consummate culture of its owner: he was almost asking himself what right this man had to spend so much money and care in decorating a few rooms for a few months, this man whose life was so radically selfish? Hawkesbury’s was, he might have said, the feeling of one who was a socialist and worker by intense conviction, finding himself opposed to one who was an aristocrat and hedonist by the mere chance of birth and fortune. But, when Gildea met and greeted him with the frank sweet unconscious cordiality of an equal whose acquaintance is pleasant, the dark look passed from Hawkesbury’s face and he gave himself up to the simple pleasure of the situation. His unexpected introduction to Maddock, who represented to him the more or less sumptuous aristocrat of religion, for a moment, it is true, threatened to bring back the evil spirit to him; but Maddock, with his fine social tact, almost divining the state of affairs, was equally frank, sweet, unconscious and cordial in his manner, and Hawkesbury was at his ease.

The three men stood talking together, Maddock in the middle, in the bay-window that looked out over the harbour.

“Why, Sir Horace,” said Maddock, “you will never be able to get away from this enchanting place again! Are you sure you do not intend to make it into a home? You did not honour your Melbourne rooms with such care—such choice of furniture, and....” (He raised his arm and outspread hand, smiling humorously).

“‘Man delights not me,’” answered Gildea, “‘No, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.’” The smile broke out on Hawkesbury’s face too. It was soothing and very pleasant to find these two talking in his presence of such an intimate matter as that alluded to here: he was not accustomed, in the company of, what in Australia and even England goes by the name of, ladies and gentlemen to this complete absence of social and individual constraint.

Then Edgar, Gildea’s valet, ushered in someone else, Mr. Fitzgerald, and there was a movement and introductions between Maddock, Hawkesbury, and the new-comer, the three being left alone for a moment while Gildea was giving some directions to Edgar about domestic arrangements.

Maddock and Fitzgerald fell almost immediately into a conversation, Hawkesbury playing the part of silent member. The Doctor was interested in finding out what the impressions of a cultured Roman Catholic were of Australia and more particularly of Victoria and New South Wales. He asked a few questions, the answer to which, he thought, would show him whether Fitzgerald had observed things with care and sympathy, and was answered with a gentle readiness that pleased and satisfied him. The two men felt themselves to a certain extent on common ground, and, Fitzgerald touching incidentally on the education question, they began to parallelise each other’s views with cordiality.

“We quite recognise,” said Fitzgerald, “all the difficulties of the case—the danger of the unfair influence of catholic teaching over protestant children, or vice versa, just as each happens to be stronger in the particular place and school. But we would accept this danger—accept it, even supposing we were the losers by it—rather than have the present state of things continue. As our Archbishop said only the other day at Leichardt: ‘Besides the faculties of intellect and of reason, there are certain passions of the soul,’ and to develop the former and wholly neglect the latter is to send a boy out into the world with only one eye. You have prepared him for the temporary business of life, and unfitted him for the glorious service of eternity: you have given his ship fine sails, and forgotten to add a rudder! He may be an acute man of business, but he will be a bad citizen; for, in taking away from him his sense of religion, you will take away from him his sense of morality, of honesty, of integrity! We can, at the present stage, see for Australia no future save that of corruption—a corrupt political life, a corrupt national life, the unlimited worship of Mammon!”

“I agree with you to a large extent,” said Maddock, “and we all know that, practically speaking, the talk about ‘religious education at home’ is mere verbiage. If the education of a child is secular, his spiritual lungs, so to speak, end in being able to inhale no other air and thrive on it.”

“And,” Fitzgerald said, “the education is secular! Every effort is being made to drive the voluntary schools out of the field. Their state aid here in New South Wales is withdrawn: in England it is reduced to a pittance and hedged about with annoyance. And this, although the educational reports, drawn up by a secular commission, show that, at any rate the catholic schools educate on the average both better and more cheaply than the state-schools do! We only ask for fair play, and now it has come to this pass that we cannot get it! All over England the protestant voluntary schools are failing and disappearing. But we, we Catholics, who cannot, as Protestants do, console ourselves with the reflection that the atmosphere of the state-schools, if secular, will be tempered by that of our own beliefs—we will not fail and disappear! We are the poorest of all religious bodies in England; but I will venture to say, that not a single case can be found of a catholic school which has surrendered itself up, as these others did, into the hands of the Secularists. Our educating priests and laymen have to suffer much privation: I know, shall I say hundreds, of them who deny themselves all but the bare necessities of life; but—we stand our ground!... You see,” he added smiling gently, “we Catholics cannot labour under any delusion here. We recognize that this is a stupendous crisis in the world’s history. We will have no compromise and secular tempering of the wind to the shorn Christian. We will stand to our guns, and, if we must perish, perish there!”

Maddock was impressed, and so even was Hawkesbury. This man’s enthusiasm was so quiet, so clear, and yet so radiant. Gildea returned and joined them.

“We were speaking of the popular education,” said Fitzgerald, turning to him, “and I would persuade Dr. Maddock that his cause and ours are here identic.”

“I need no persuading,” said Maddock, “I have for some time been persuading myself!”

“And yet,” Fitzgerald put in gently, “the alliance between us and you seems farther off than between us and the Dissenters.”

“And that, I think,” Gildea said, “is because you have more in common. You are afraid of one another. In the one case, you know that the frontier of your alliance will be observed, in the other there is a chance that it may not. At present the most dangerous opponents of Catholicism in England are, what they call, the High Churchmen. The Church of England is a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism; hence its adaptiveness, hence its strength! It more nearly, in my opinion, approaches ideal Christianity than any other sect in existence. It unites the Faith, the Poetry, of Catholicism, with the Freedom, the Prose, of Protestantism.”

“We thank you,” said Maddock.

“Logically speaking, however,” added Gildea, “it is an absurdity.”

They all began to laugh.

“Ah,” said Maddock, “I was right when, even while thanking you, Sir Horace, I thought to myself: Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes.”

“The Christianity of the Future,” Gildea proceeded gravely, “lies, I believe, in two transformations—in Catholicism learning that its kingdom is not of this world, that it no longer requires a Pope, a Rome, as a Palladium whereby it may fight; in a word, in learning the lesson of Protestantism, of Freedom: and in Protestantism doing the converse, and absorbing into itself the catholic Faith, the catholic Poetry!”

“And what are the Secularists going to do in your Future?” asked Hawkesbury, “are Messrs. Arnold and Huxley to be put up on a shelf in your spiritual Museum, in two large spirit bottles, labelled respectively ‘Culture’ and ‘Science?’”

“Culture,” answered Gildea, “is, after all, but Secular Catholicism, just as Science is but Secular Protestantism. They too will each learn their lesson of the other.”

“Humph!” said Maddock, who again had a faint suspicion that Gildea was mocking, “and so, after all, Sir Horace is an optimist.”

“We do not lay stress,” Fitzgerald said gently, “on the temporal power of the Holy Father. As Sir Horace implied, this temporal power was once the one shining light in a chaotic world, and it was well that it should be set on a hill. But now the light is diffusing itself. It is our wish that, as the Vatican Œcumenical Council declared: ‘Intelligence, Knowledge, and Wisdom may grow and perfect themselves—as much with the mass as with individuals, with one man as with the whole church!’ We are no foes to Freedom. What we are foes to, is Anarchy! At the Reformation you gave the right of deciding on the deepest religious questions to every ignorant man that chose to discuss them, and the seamless robe of Christianity was rent into a hundred pieces! Look at all these miserable little protestant sects and sub-sects, Plymouth Brethren, Primitive Methodists, Ana-baptists, and I know not what noisy, ignorant fanatics. At the Revolution, you did the same for social questions, and what is the result? The Dynamiters of Russia, of Germany, of Ireland, initiated by what you, Dr. Maddock, so well call ‘such gentleness as was revealed in the diabolical deeds of the Commune,’—to say nothing of those of the Reign of Terror.”

Maddock half-deprecated, half-approved by a gesture and an inarticulate sound.

“Yes, but,” said Hawkesbury with the thrilled voice of suppressed passion, “has not history justified the Reformation? and how can you say that it will not justify the Revolution? These, as it seems to me, are the two fiery portals which lead to Religious and Social Liberty. But you are right to depreciate them: they knew nothing of the poetry of Culture and Catholicism, or of the prose of Protestantism and Science. They were volcanic eruptions of the People. Heine says well, when he talks of ‘the divine brutality’ of Luther, and we do not shrink from the same phrase for Hugo or Whitman. Sir Horace has painted us a Future which is indeed heavenly. It is thronged with sweet-singing angels, and there is not a shadow in its perfect light. But what has become of the men, and what, O what, has become of the devils? They have no place in this Future. You do not care for the People, I say, except as you care for your dog which, if he is quiet and docile, shall have a kennel and the bones and scraps from your table; or, if he is surly, shall be chained up; or, if he goes mad, shall be shot! Ah believe me, gentlemen, the People has a place in the Future, for the People, and none other, is the Future! ‘All for the modern,’ cries Whitman, ‘all for the average man of to-day.’ But you—you only care for the Upper and the Middle-class. Your scheme of civilization does not reach to the People. The Upper-class is exhausted: it needs invigorating. ‘Cultivate the Middle-class,’ is the cry, ‘Give us Higher Education for the Middle-class!’ This is the whole social teaching of the best representative man you have, Matthew Arnold. Now we, we Socialists as you call us, love the People, and (you will pardon me) hate the Middle-class;—the dispossessed, the sufferers, not the possessors, the usurpers! The People is the Prodigal Son. What sympathy have we, then, with a man like Arnold who has devoted himself to the edification of the Elder Brother? Arnold says once that he has evolved that perfect style of his which we know so well—that style which encloses a minimum of ideas in a maximum of catch-words—or, as he likes to call it, ‘plain popular exposition’—for the especial benefit of the British Philistine, the divine Middle-class, who otherwise could not be got to read him! He would have done better, perhaps, if he had not turned to the setting, but to the rising sun. The People are the masters of the Future, and the People’s great men will be the great men of the Future.”

There was a pause. Then:

“There is much truth in what Mr. Hawkesbury says,” says Gildea, “Just at present we think too much of the ultimate Culture of the Middle-class and too little of that of the People. But the fact is, that the question of the Middle-class is pressing: they are, as you say, Hawkesbury, the possessors; they are the Present! And this, I think, is why men like Arnold, who believe that, in the organization of the Present, lies the only hope of the success of the Future, are so anxious about it. It is a case, as he believes, of ‘Culture or Anarchy’—Culture now or Anarchy then. And Carlyle, a disciple of whom Mr. Hawkesbury has, in the admirable Preface to his second book of Poems, declared himself to be; Carlyle too, who laid much stress on what he calls ‘the radical element’ in himself, yet mocks at ‘Mill and Co.’ as he says, in whom he declares the opposite element was ‘so miserably lacking.’ Carlyle had no respect for ‘Rousseau fanaticisms,’ even in a man like Mazzini: he saw that, if the Middle-class were purblind and slow, the Socialists were only purblind and quick. Supposing that we grant that the Dynamiters of Russia are justified in meeting an absolutely dense despotism with violence, what excuse but impatience can we find for the Dynamiters of Ireland? The first have no means of free agitation, the second have every means. Ireland has been wronged: no one denies it; and never, in the whole course of her history, has England shown such alacrity as she is doing now to right the wrong; never, not even for herself. But the Irish Socialists are impatient: their cry is for everything to-day, this very hour! To grant it them would be the greatest unkindness possible. Well, they too have taken to dynamite as a hypochondriac takes to opium. The Russian Nihilists are noble people, none nobler, but they taught fools and knaves an appalling lesson when they inaugurated the reign of terror in Petersburg. At the present moment, as Heine clearly foresaw, the Civilization, not of Europe, but of the whole world is in danger.”

“You speak well, Sir Horace,” said Maddock, “and express my opinions better than I could myself, but—Timeo.”

He, Gildea, and Fitzgerald smiled. Hawkesbury was grave. There was a pause. Then:

“I think,” he said, “that you do the People wrong. These extreme Socialists, the Nihilists as they are called, are not from the People, but from the Middle-class. They are, as a rule, men who have received the best education of the time, and who yet find themselves unrecognized and unrewarded. Most of them are journalists. It would astonish you, I think, to see the amount of really first-rate talent that is being flogged to death in the shafts of the modern Press. These men cannot work in shops and banks: the narrow material life has been made impossible to them. The only opening for the life they would—nay, that they must live, or perish, is that of Literature. Literature caters for the Middle-class, the ruling class. These men, then, are the slaves of the great caterers, the newspaper editors. One of the most thorough Socialists I ever knew, Holden, in fact, was on the regular staff of the English Spectator, the organ of the enlightened portion of the Middle-class; and there, as he said to me, he went as near Socialism as he could for threepence! (Threepence is the price of the paper.) This same man wrote, too, political articles for a distinguished radical politician, and I have seen the proof-sheets of these hacked and mauled by the patron to suit the palates of the Radicals. It was this man who once seriously contemplated dropping a bomb in the House of Lords, to show that herd of hereditary liars, as he put it, that there was such a thing as justice in the world! He loved the People: he hated the Middle-class, but the People cared nothing for him. It is, then, I think, a mistake to lay the paternity of Nihilism to the charge of any but the over-fed tyrannous Middle-class.”

“What you say,” Maddock said slowly and courteously, “is very interesting and instructive, Mr. Hawkesbury, and I perceive that the ground which you, and I think I may say Mr. Fitzgerald,” (Fitzgerald smiled and bowed), “and myself have in common is large enough to admit of our working—at any rate not in opposition to one another. Is not our mutual object the enlightenment of the unintelligent mass of the People and of the Middle-class? I am, I am sure, grateful to you, sir, for the manner in which you have brought this home to me. I always felt that underneath all our differences—I mean, the differences of our beliefs, religious or social—we had a common ground, the advancement of a really good and true Civilization, and now, I think, I know this. He renders us a great service who makes our feelings self-conscious, who turns them into the articulate thought of words.”

There was a slight pause.

“And now,” said Gildea, in his half-amused way, “we will, if you please, go down to lunch. Mr. Alcock particularly asked me not to wait for him, and we have waited, it seems unconsciously, for over half-an-hour.”

They went down together into the dining-room, chatting lightly and pleasantly.

IV.

The dining-room was the corresponding room on the ground story to the sitting-room up above. It was quite as well furnished, but in a different style. A fine rather than an exquisite form of beauty had been sought after. It was a saying of Gildea’s that a dining-room ought to give you an impression somewhat similar to that of a beach-brake in spring: the architecture and furniture should have clear outlines, the colours should be clear, the lights should be clear. All massiveness and duskiness was to be avoided. A meal ought to be a repast, not a feast: we should rise pleasantly satisfied, not dully satiated. In a sitting-room, on the other hand, the sworn abode of the sweet and delicate talk and music of women, just as the dining-room was that of the serene discussions of men, there should be something of the lush luxuriance in shape and colour of the midsummer woods, knights and ladies and all the figures of romance and fairy-tale passing together. But such an arrangement of rooms as this, he would say with his bright half-mocking smile, was at present like a damsel of the Middle Ages suddenly awakened in the dull derisive streets of London or Manchester. This will only come to pass in that wonderful Future, when we have all learned that Beauty and Truth are synonyms, and Keats has statues and altars like Sophokles of old.

Considerable time, wealth and trouble had been spent on this house. Sydney and Melbourne had been ransacked for beautiful things worthy of Gildea’s ideas of “the nest,” as he called it to himself, that he desired; for this was indeed one, and not the least remarkable, of his freaks. It had been aroused in this fashion. One afternoon, sauntering across a road in the Domain, he had almost been run over by someone riding a splendid bay horse. Looking up, with a fine touch of anger, he had perceived that it was a lady, who was looking down at him with a look, he suddenly felt, so precisely his own that, the ludicrous aspect of the thing coming upon him, he smiled. She too, at once following his change of feeling, smiled, and then in a moment, with a slight courteous movement of hand and body, had passed. It had all taken place in a few seconds. Her face and form made up between them, he thought, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he had not seen few so-called whether in Europe or elsewhere. Beauty in women was, according to Gildea, a thing which was not in reality to be seen in the present world, implying, as it did, perfection of form and perfection of spirit, καλον κἀγαθον. The Athens of Perikles had produced female beauty; in the face and form of the Venus of Milo the highest physical and spiritual perfection of the time is apparent. Florence too, in such a woman as Vittoria Colonna, had produced female beauty, and the Renascence had incarnated it in a Marie Stuart; but, so far, our Modernity was not ripe for it. Lovely female faces it, as all times, had in abundance, but these faces knew nothing of spiritual perfection: they knew nothing of life, they were not beautiful. And the female faces that did know of life, the faces of women like George Sand, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, were quite wanting in physical perfection. They imply mental passion, the struggle of pain: they have not reached to the serene pleasure of spiritual sovereignty. No, Beauty, καλον κἀγαθον, is to be a produce of the Future when Modernity has passed through the pangs of its travail and, in the bright light of health and youthfulness, “grows in wisdom and stature” to the perfect self.—But this face that he had seen for a moment, was, he thought, really beautiful.

A few yards from him a man was standing looking back at the rider passing along under the trees. Gildea came to him, and asked him courteously if he happened to know who the lady was?

“No,” said the man, “I don’t know who she is, but I often see her.”

And on this incident Gildea had founded a freak which had for some time amused him. He intended to see this woman again, and, if he was correct in his supposition (which he used amusedly to doubt to himself) that she was some phenomenal anticipation of the Future, to possess her. He set about choosing and furnishing a house, therefore, which should, as far as possible, be worthy of such an individual, and much amusement it occasionally afforded him. A private enquiry-office was meantime seeking her out; and, about a month ago, Gildea to his surprise had been informed that she was, beyond doubt, a Miss Medwin, niece of the well-known squatter, english, eccentric even to the extent of riding about and shooting in man’s clothes on one of Mr. Medwin’s stations in New South Wales, and, moreover, strongly suspected of having had, and of still having, an intrigue with a Mr. Frank Hawkesbury, a writer and man of uncertain means, in Melbourne. Gildea laughed much on receiving this unasked-for report, (He had just by accident made the acquaintance of Hawkesbury), and his interest in his freak somewhat revived; but his all but conviction that he was incorrect in his view of Miss Medwin (if it were indeed she), prevented him from having any great interest in the matter or any great anticipations of success. As usual, however, he was satisfied to find that he had any interest or anticipations at all. He learned from Mrs. Medwin that she was in a short time coming to Sydney for a week or so on her road up to one of Mr. Medwin’s New South Wales stations to which she had not been for years, and would be pleased to see him. A few days ago, then, she and Miss Medwin had arrived, and were waiting for Mr. Medwin who was detained by business in Melbourne. Hence Gildea’s invitation to Mrs. Medwin and her niece, to come and make tea for him and go for a sail in the “Petrel.”

The party arranged itself round the table, Maddock at one end, Gildea at the other, an empty place on Gildea’s right hand for Alcock, Hawkesbury on his left with Fitzgerald next to him. Maddock, as before, could not help observing with admiration the beautiful room in which they were sitting. Hawkesbury, however, following out a train of thought suggested by his own last words, sat serious, looking at the table-cloth.

The lunch began. Gildea and Fitzgerald could both, when they pleased, excel in that graceful sweetness of manner which is supposed to be the peculiar gift of women. They pleased now. The talk flowed lightly and pleasantly, and soon returned to, what seemed to be to them all, the most interesting topic—the People. Fitzgerald spoke of the far greater ease and leisure of the People here than in England, and that led on to a consideration of the question of Labour here.

“Carlyle declared long ago,” said Hawkesbury suddenly, “that the great question of the time was no other than the organization of Labour. Well, Labour is at last organizing. The consequence is that, as Mr. Fitzgerald remarked, there is greater ease and leisure among the People, not only here in Australia where Labour is comparatively scarce, but even in England where it is plentiful.—The question here, however,” he added, “shows signs of complication. The employers are to form—nay, have already formed—a union: ‘The Victorian Employers’ Union.’ The only wonder is that it is in Victoria and not in England that this idea has first been adopted. In Trades-Unionism in England, let me say it at once, there have been many abuses; but, let me hasten to add, not nearly so many abuses as there were under the old despotism of Capital. Trades-Unionism, which so few people seem to understand, originally meant the combination of many oppressed small units against a great oppressing unit. Now it means more: it means the determined effort of the People after happiness.”

“That is very true, I think,” said Gildea, “The People, ever since the deception practised upon them by the compromise Reform Bill of ’32, have been slowly learning to organize themselves and to rely on themselves alone. Such a fact soon makes itself apparent. There is not a single considerable political measure since ’32 which has not a socialistic tendency.”

Hawkesbury acknowledged Gildea’s remark, and proceeded:

“The People, and by the People I mean of course the masses, is everywhere realizing that there is something better worth living for than frantic competition and the scramble for wealth. Trades-Unionism, then, is the sworn foe of all this. I am not speaking either for or against Trades-Unionism: I am simply stating what it wants, what it is! The Trades-hall delegates, in the late conference anent the Bootmakers’ strike in Melbourne, refused to let a bootmaker work for more than eight hours a day, although, by so doing, he might better himself, and by not so doing might keep himself for ever a mere journeyman. ‘Further argument with men of such a way of thinking,’ says Mr. Bruce Smith, the chief mover of the ‘Victorian Employers’ Union,’ ‘further argument seemed useless.’ And it was indeed as it seemed; for these men were of opinion that if, in the frantic competition and scramble for wealth, one or two journeymen did rise and become rich, hundreds and thousands would have to lead lives which would not stand too favourable a comparison with those of dogs. ‘Therefore,’ the delegates would say, ‘we will check this frantic competition and scramble for wealth, and we will even be so wicked as to sacrifice the one or two possible journeymen who might rise and become rich, for the sake of the actual hundreds and thousands whose lives otherwise would not stand too favourable a comparison with those of dogs.’ Well, and what will be the end of this new phase of the great battle of Capital versus Labour on which we seem to be now entering here? Let me not be thought a terrorist, if I remark, what is indeed patent to all, that, in a country with a franchise like ours, Labour, if driven into a corner and confronted by Capital triumphantly brandishing its sword of ‘Frantic-competition-and-the-scramble-for-wealth—Labour, I say, might make things excessively uncomfortable for the community in general and Capital in particular. I am not hinting at mobs and sticks and stones. I am merely stating a fact that is patent to all. Our good friends the Landed-proprietors, videlicet the squatters, have experienced in Victoria and elsewhere—are indeed now experiencing even in Queensland[13]—the undoubted benefits of a little judicious legislation. Might not someone suggest to the ‘Victorian Employers’ Union’ and Mr. Bruce Smith, who seem to have such quaint notions of what Trades-Unionism really wants and is, that the same fate may possibly be in store for our other good friends, the Capitalists?”

“It is a pity,” said Gildea smiling, “that we have not a Capitalist here to answer you. But, I think, I know what one of them, Mr. Alcock, would say. He would say that the great law of Nature is this very frantic struggle which you deprecate, and that, if you attempt to put a check on it, you will only end by first arresting and then destroying all progress. He would oppose the interference of organized Labour quite as much as of organized public opinion, that is to say the State. He would of course recognize all the evils of the frantic struggle, but he would say that it yet contained the great ascending and progressive power of Nature, it was yet capable of Evolution; whereas the artificial state of popular leisure and ease contains the great de-scending and retrogressive power of Nature, Dissolution.—But here,” he said, “at the very nick of time, he comes himself.”

Edgar, who had just left them, returned ushering in Alcock, who came forward with somewhat off-hand apologies to shake hands with Gildea. He was then introduced to Maddock and shook hands with him, compromising the matter, as he thought, with the others by a bow and an expression of his pleasure at making their acquaintance. He sat down in his place and, having told Edgar what he chose to eat, was ready for a few moments’ talk before setting somewhat vigorously to work on the victuals. Gildea explained to him the conversational context, and what he himself had ventured to say in the person of the typical scientific capitalist.

“Well,” Alcock said, with a half-pleased half-amused look on his face, when Gildea had finished, “I will observe that, on the whole, you didn’t put my sentiments so badly, Sir Horace.—I am opposed to all state interference,” he declared, turning to Maddock, “It doesn’t pay in the long run; it enervates people! Look at this New South Wales here. They can’t put a bridge across a creek now, without petitioning government for assistance! In England a half-dozen men or so would have got together and settled the matter themselves. And they want more state interference in Victoria! Why, it’ll drain out all their independence, and energy; and, in twenty years, they’ll be as lazy and lackadaisical as they are here in New South Wales! Competition’s the law of Nature.” By this time Alcock’s mouth was full, and he was beginning to enjoy the delicate food and wines, for he was hungry and thirsty. There was a pause.

“True,” said Fitzgerald, gently breaking it, “but does not Mr. Alcock too think, that it is just where the law of Nature ends that the law of Humanity begins? Surely this is the essential position of Christianity, that it says to the brutality of Nature: ‘Thus far shalt thou go, and no further.’”

“You can’t,” answered Alcock with his mouth full, too intent on the victuals to be more explicit, “You can’t interfere—impunity—great law—nature—struggle—existence—survival—fittest.”

“Here, then,” said Fitzgerald who ate little and drank less, turning to Hawkesbury, “we are at one, I think, as opposed to the pure Scientists?”

“I do not believe,” Hawkesbury said, “and I do not think any Socialist believes, in carrying the initiative of the individual to the extent that Herbert Spencer would like. But we are not in favour of state interference. We want to nationalize things, the land, the unearned increment, the great public enterprises, but we include in this term the State also. The State at present means the tool of the Middle-class, worked by Capital and the Land Interest. This arrangement partakes too much of the nature of a political joint-stock company to please Socialists.”

“And you think,” asked Gildea, his hand on his wine glass, looking at Hawkesbury, “you think that when the People wins, as it of course ultimately will win, the control of things, that it will not work the State in its own interest, just as the Aristocracy did and as the Middle-class does?”

“You know,” Hawkesbury said, “I believe in the People! The People is the only unselfish part of society. Their one desire is for justice and mercy; and, when they could not get it themselves, they have always died readily for those who, they believed, wished to give it them. Herein lies the secret of all great popular devotions—from that of Christ to that of Napoleon.”

“I,” said Alcock, “do not believe in the People, as you call them, and their unselfishness has not yet come under my notice. The People, like everyone else, are led by what they believe to be their interests, their immediate interests, and our great effort should be, by giving them a good sound practical education, to get them to see that their true interest lies in e-volution and not in re-volution. Let us have a fair chance for everybody, and let the best men win.”

“Yes,” said Hawkesbury, with suppressed eagerness, “but the trouble is that, in this so-called free competition of yours, the best don’t win! In Nature the best win, I agree; but Civilization has complicating clauses that modify and all but change, what you rightly call, her great law—the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest.”

“I do not see that,” said Alcock, returning to his victuals which he had left for a few moments.

“I will give you an instance,” said Hawkesbury, “A, B, and C are three men who start as beggars in the market of free competition. A has the best wits, and A accordingly wins, and makes a fortune. Good: we applaud! Then A, B, and C all die, leaving sons D, E, and F, the best-witted of whom does not happen to be D, A’s son, but E, the son of B. Does E therefore win and make a fortune, and D sink down to his proper level with F? Not a bit of it! D has not only his own second-rate powers to help him: he has also the wealth which he inherits from his father. E, then, has no chance against him: the second-rate man with wealth overwhelms the first-rate man with beggary. What are the consequences, generally speaking? Why, that, instead of the best surviving, the second or third or fourth or fifth-best survive, and the market is drugged with successful mediocrity. Here, I think, is the delusion under which Herbert Spencer’s social philosophy labours: he does not see that Civilization, as we know it at present, is not a natural but an artificial state, and that therefore the laws which hold good in Nature by no means necessarily hold good in Civilization. Look at the bees or ants, whose Civilization is a natural and not, as ours is, an artificial one: do they encourage free competition with its inevitable concomitants of wealth and power accumulated in the hands of a few to the prejudice of the community? Not so. To each is assigned an equal, if varying, share in the economy of the community. With them work has its duty, and, as for idleness, it is not possible. But what duty has the successful business man, except to his own success? what duty has the wealthy aristocrat, except to his own pleasure?” There was a slight pause.