The Socialist Part 23

He had told Lord Hayle and Lady Constance all about his experience of the afternoon. Neither of them had been very interested, and Lady Constance remarked that all "excursions into _les coulisses_ must surely be rather disappointing."

In fact, the Camborne family regarded the whole thing as a rather too amiable weakness on the part of their guest. The bishop, who was always running backwards and forwards at this time from his palace at Carlton to his house in Grosvenor Street, often made a genial jest upon the subject to the young man. "My dear Paddington," he would say, "how is the attack going? Ha, ha! Every day, when I open my newspapers, I find that the general public is being worked up to a perfect froth of excitement about this forthcoming theatrical enterprise. A peer in the pillory! The duke in the dock! How amusing it all is!"

Thus the bishop scoffed on more than one occasion, and his witticisms had no very exhilarating effect upon the duke.

His life in Grosvenor Street was happier with the younger members of the family. His dear friend Gerald was still as sympathetic and vivid as ever. Lord Hayle had pa.s.sed the test of intimate human a.s.sociation, and come out of it very well. Lady Constance was as ever--beautiful, sweet, and sympathetic--but the duke was finding that in the very splendour of the girl's nature and appearance there was something a trifle cloying.

He was deeply in love with her; he knew also that she cared for him, but for the first time in his guarded, s.h.i.+elded life he saw before him times of indecision and of trouble. Life, which had seemed so smooth and stately, so well ordered a thing, was not quite what it had been. The serene repose of his mind was disturbed by all he had gone through.

Sometimes he went and took tea with Mrs. Rose, and often her husband, Mr. Conrad, and Mary Marriott were there. He never attempted to argue with any of them. He took their shafts of wit with a quiet complaisance, but if they thought that their epigrams had not gone home they were very deeply mistaken.

One afternoon, tired and troubled, the duke bethought himself of his great house in Piccadilly. He walked there from Grosvenor Street, astonished the servants by ringing the bell, and, entering, he moodily surveyed some of his famous possessions.

Then he turned into the library. The three great fires were burning down. It was about six o'clock. He switched on the electric light himself and wandered through the maze of his treasures.

He came up to a table--a huge writing-table, covered with red leather--and saw upon it five or six sheets of ma.n.u.script in careful handwriting. Forgetting exactly what he was doing, thinking nothing of the man he had appointed to be librarian, the duke sat down and began to read.

CHAPTER XVI

ARTHUR BURNSIDE'S VIEWS

This was the doc.u.ment that the duke read with amazement and growing interest in the great empty library of his palace. It was obviously the peroration of an important work--

"Are we already in the position of ancient Rome? Are we moribund?

No barbarians, indeed, stand with menace of conquering at our gates, but it was not the barbarians who overthrew the greatness of the Roman Empire. The greatness had already departed long before the Huns and Goths swept down upon its walls. In her early strength Rome, the capital of the world, would have rolled back her invaders, as a rock resists the onslaught of an angry wave; but Rome, when she fell, was no longer as she had been in her earlier days.

"And we must ask ourselves now whether our own civilisation, with all its wonders, is not tending to a like end? Are we not reproducing in faithful detail every cause which led to the downfall of the civilisations of other days? We are Imperialists, that is to say, we take tribute from conquered races. Great fortunes are constantly acc.u.mulated, to the defeat of individuals in our midst. An enormous population is with us, which owns no property, and lives always in grinding poverty. A great portion of the land of the country has gone out of cultivation. The physical deterioration of Englishmen is a well known and most alarming fact, which can be proved over and over again by the statistics of the medical schools. I am not concerned here to prove any statements I make in the last few lines of this book. They have been proved in the earlier portions. This is a summing up.

"And it is for these reasons that we who are socialists say that the system which is producing such appalling results shall not be allowed to continue. It is a system which has taken from religion much of its natural appeal and consoling power over the hearts and souls of the majority. It is a system which has destroyed, handicapped, and turned the protection of the useful and necessary things of life into a soulless progress of mechanism controlled by slaves. It is a system which awards the palm of success to the unscrupulous, corrupts the press, turns pure women on to the streets, and transforms upright men into mean-spirited time-servers.

"It cannot continue.

"In the end it is bound to work its own overthrow.

"Socialism, with its promise of freedom, its larger hope for humanity, its triumph of peace over war, its binding of the races of the earth into one all-embracing brotherhood, must in the end prevail. Capitalism is the creed of the dying present; Socialism throbs with the life of the days that are to be. Socialism has claimed its martyrs in the past, and to-day, also, it has claimed them. But before long the martyrs in the cause of humanity all will see--let us hope and believe from another and better ordered life--that their efforts have not been in vain.

"I write, perhaps, in these last words, from a somewhat academic standpoint. I do not think, however, that my readers who have followed me so far will accuse me of pure theorising in the earlier portions of this work. At the same time, experience is merely the lesson learnt by event, and I do not think I shall be unduly ponderous if I again, and finally, draw attention to those stupendous teachings which the student of history draws from the past and applies to the amelioration of the present.

"It cannot be too loudly proclaimed! Academic evolution necessarily goes hand-in-hand with a moral development strictly related to it.

Nowadays, broken into the individualistic system, we regard with astonishment the fierce patriotism which inflamed the little cities and republics of antiquity, the States of Greece, the Kingdoms of Italy, and even the larger and less civilised hordes of the North.

Yet, if we regard it for a moment, we shall see that this sentiment was merely inspired by the eradicable instinct of self-preservation. In the bosom of the clans, in the heart of the families, interests were consolidated and the fact was realised.

And in those days, also, defeat might not only bring ruin and a total loss of comfort and worldly possession, but it would also mean slavery.

"In those days, indeed, the conqueror, whether barbarian or not, could not fail to appear. He intervened always wherever great wealth was ama.s.sed in the hands of a population incapable of defending it. And, taking these lessons of history to ourselves, we can see that, though the whole conditions of society have changed, a conqueror must still appear and throw down the existing system with all its horrors and anachronisms.

"Once more let me point out that England at present is dominated by certain economic facts.

"Although there is plenty of food, clothing, and shelter available in the country, an enormous population of these islands do not obtain enough of any of them to support life properly, or even in the simplest way possible, to secure ordinary health and ordinary enjoyment of existence.

"Again, then, the statistics quoted in the earlier part of this work inevitably show, with all the rigour of hard facts and una.s.sailable statistics, that each year many people die from overwork or want.

"The producers of wealth are poor, miserable, and enslaved, while those who enjoy the wealth thus produced in misery are idle, corrupt, and enervated by their riches. There are more than a million men needing work and wages in England at the present moment, while, at the same time, we keep the land of the country less than one-quarter tilled.

"As Mr. John Kenworthy has written, in words which re-echo and reverberate in the ears of modern men: 'These accusations are facts as palpable and clear as heaven and earth above us and beneath us; not to be disputed by any person of ordinary sense. Surely we have enough of stupidity and wrong here to certify ourselves a nation not only "mostly fools" but largely knaves also.'

"In truth n.o.body disputes this state of affairs. You may prove the extremest horrors straight from Government Blue Books. Recently some very full particulars concerning mining industries were put into one of those Government coffins for burying disagreeable truths. One might expect that, after having such particulars of overwork underpaid and murderous housing thrust into their notice, a Parliament which served humanity and not the brood of Mammon would sit night and day until the law had done what law can do to right these wrongs. But no, the six hundred gentlemen of Parliament who play with the mouse-like people in a gentle, cat-like fas.h.i.+on, did--just nothing, as usual! No doubt members of Parliament are filled with good resolutions to do something for the people; but the intentions always go down before the hard fact that doing anything for the people is found to mean, in practice, giving up some right of property.

"Upon this one issue, the right of property, the whole social question centres. The man who has discovered what the right of property means now, and what it ought to mean, and would mean among good and honest people, may claim to have solved the problem of misery which baffles the nations of the world."

The duke put the ma.n.u.script down upon the huge, leather-covered table and looked at it thoughtfully. He saw the neat, careful writing--the writing of a man who had been accustomed to write Greek. He smiled to himself with a dreamy appreciation of the well-known fact that no scholar writes like an ordinary man, and that always the hand which, in youth at a public school, has been inured to the careful tracing of Greek script, betrays itself when writing English by a meticulous care in the forming of each individual word.

Then, quite suddenly, the duke sat down and leaned back in a high-cus.h.i.+oned chair. He had not been in his famous library for a very long time. He felt forlorn and alone in it, and he looked round upon its glories with a sort of wonder. "Does all this belong to me?" he thought. "Of course it does, and yet how little I see of it; how little I know of it! I pay a man merely to catalogue the treasures here."

The electric lights glowed softly all over the vast place and the young man looked round him with a sigh of perplexity. It did not interest him very much to know that on all sides were books and ma.n.u.scripts that were absolutely priceless. He felt, as he sat there, that the world was a most perplexing place.

The great mahogany door at the end of the library opened, and the trusted servant in charge of the staff still maintained in the ducal house hurried in.

"Your Grace," he said, as he came up to the duke, "can I bring you anything? Can I do anything?"

The duke had not an idea of the man's name--all these details were arranged by Colonel Simpson for the young man.

"No, no," he said; "I thank you very much but I don't want anything. I shall be leaving the house very soon."

"But, your Grace," the man went on, "you will please allow me to make up the fires?"

"Oh, yes," the duke answered; "you may as well do that, and then you can leave me alone. I will let myself out."

"I thank your Grace," said the man. And, with noiseless footsteps he went away.

In two minutes three men were in the library and the dying fires were revived, until, as the dark came over London, a great red blaze threw odd contrasts of red light and shadow into the rich place.

The men went away, and when they had gone the duke walked up and down the room for a minute or two, and then discovered, near the door which led into the hall, the switches which controlled the electric lights.

He switched off the whole illumination, save only the one standard lamp upon the writing-table. Then he went back to his seat.

He sat down and looked about him. The ruddy, cheerful light was all around. Below his eyes upon the table the shaded electric-light lamp threw a brilliant circle of light upon the ma.n.u.scripts which he had been reading. Beyond everything was mysterious.

The duke sighed, and once more took up the ma.n.u.script.

"Yes," he said to himself, "if every one was good. That is the whole point. Now I must finish this. But how extraordinary! I meet a man in my own college and make him librarian here, and he, too, turns out to be a Socialist, and to be writing a book upon Socialism. A book which, if I am not very much mistaken, will simply become the bible of all of them.

Fabian Rose never told me that he knew Burnside! Of course, that is not very extraordinary, because it would not be in his way to tell me. It would not have occurred to him. But how strange it is! On all sides, on all occasions, Fate or Providence seems to have brought me among the ranks of the Socialists. Well, I'll just finish this."

The duke took up the ma.n.u.script once more. There was no rancour in his heart against the young man who, surrounded by the pomp and luxury of his employer's property, was nevertheless, and at the same moment, writing against people such as the duke was.