Thorne Guy
The Socialist

CHAPTER XVI
ARTHUR BURNSIDE'S VIEWS

This was the document 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 accumulated, 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 amassed 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 unassailable 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 nobody 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 fashion, 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 manuscript 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-cushioned 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 manuscripts 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 manuscripts which he had been reading. Beyond everything was mysterious.

The duke sighed, and once more took up the manuscript.

"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 manuscript 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.

The duke did not take the attacks very seriously. The forthcoming play had seemed to him rather futile. All that Rose, Mr. Conrad, and the group of their friends who met at the house in Westminster, had said certainly had opened the young man's mind; but nevertheless he had not felt any of the real force of the attack as yet.

He took up the manuscript and read the remaining pages.

There was a cross-heading upon one, and it was this —

"THE REAL SOLUTION"

"The real solution, let me finally say, is indubitably this: I have hinted at it throughout the pages of this work. I have tried to lead the mind of the reader up towards the discovery of my own conviction. Now I state it.

"If human nature was naturally good, as Jean Jacques Rousseau believed it to be, then there would be no social problem. Human nature is not temperamentally good. It is temperamentally bad. Therefore, before we can reorganise Society we must reorganise character.

"And in what way is it possible to do this? Can it be done by Act of Parliament? Can it be done by articles in newspapers and reviews? Can it be done by the teaching of altruism at the hands of university settlements and propagandists? It cannot be done by any of these means.

"There is only one way in which the individual mind can be reached, touched, and influenced so strangely and so completely that the influence will be permanent, and the life of the individual will be changed.

"And that way is the Christian way.

"We must do again, if we are to realise the ideals which burn in our hearts, what the Christian Church did in the old days of the Roman Empire, and was meant to do in all ages, by means of the Old Faith 'once and for all delivered to the saints.' In those dim, far-off days the historian knows that Christianity succeeded actually in creating a new middle-class – just what was needed – of poor men made richer, and rich men made poorer in one common brotherhood. Its motto was: For all who want work, work! For those who won't work, hunger! But for the old and infirm, provision. And this the Church of Christ actually achieved, neither by denouncing nor inculcating dogma, but by insisting on and carrying out in practice its own remarkable dogmas. It is not the denial of the Real Presence at the altar, it is not its affirmation, it is not the question of the validity of the apostolic succession nor the denial of it, which will make it possible for an English world to save itself from the horrors of the present.

"It will be simply this: That those who believe in Christ as the most inspired Teacher the world has ever seen, as God-made-Man, come into this world on a great mission of regeneration, that we shall see our opportunity.

"Christianity and Socialism are inextricably entwined. Separate one from the other, as so many Socialists of nowadays are endeavouring to do, and one or the other – perhaps both – will fail of their high ideal, their splendid mission.

"Combine them, and success is real and assured. We shall all, in that happy day, begin to realise the kingdom of heaven; to re-echo in this world the dim echo of the heavenly harmonies which may then reach us from the new Jerusalem."

The duke put down the manuscript, and with slow, grave steps left his great library, crossed the famous marble hall, and went up through the enclosure of his gardens into the roar and surge of Piccadilly.

His face was curiously set and intent, as he walked to Lord Camborne's, in Grosvenor Street.

CHAPTER XVII
THE COMING OF LOVE

They were dining quite alone at the Cambornes' – the duke, the bishop, Lord Hayle, and Lady Constance.

When he had changed and came down-stairs the duke went into the drawing-room. There were still a few minutes before dinner would be served. He found himself alone, and walked up and down the beautiful room with a curious physical, as well as mental, restlessness. He felt out of tune, as it were. The tremendous upheaval in his life which he had lately experienced was not likely to be forgotten easily. He realised that, and he realised also – more poignantly perhaps at this moment than ever before – how rude a shock his life had experienced. All his ideas must be reconstructed, and the process was not a pleasant one. From the bottom of his heart he caught himself wishing that nothing had happened, that he was still without experience of the new sides of life, to which he had been introduced by such an extraordinary series of accidents.

"I was happier before," he said to himself aloud. And then, even as he did so, in a sudden flash he realised that, after all, these new experiences, disquieting as they were, were exceedingly stimulating. Was it not better that a man should wake and live, even though it was disturbing, than remain always in a sleep and a dream, uninfluenced by actualities?

Some men, he knew, held Nirvana to be the highest good. And there were many who would drink of the Waters of Lethe, could they but find them. But these were old or world-weary men. They were men who had sinned and suffered, and so desired peace. Or they were men whose bodies tormented them. He was young, strong, rich, and fortunate. He knew that, however much his newly-awakened brain might fret and perturb him, it was better to live than to stagnate even in the most gorgeous palace in the Sleeping Wood.

The simile pleased him as it came to him. As a little boy Grimm's Fairy Tales had been a wondrous treasure-house, as they have been to nearly all the upper-class children of England. He saw the whole series of pictures in the eye of memory. The happiness was not won until the last scene, when everybody woke up!

In his reverie his thoughts changed unconsciously, and dwelt with an unaccustomed effort of memory and appreciation upon the old Fairy Palace, which he had loved so in his youth. He remembered also that, one day, when of mature age, he had run over to Nice; he had gone with the Grand Duke Alexis and a few other young men to a cinematograph, for fun, after a dinner at the Hotel des Anglais.

"Le Bois Dormant!" How it had all come back! And also, what a wonderful thing a cinematograph was! He remembered the flickering beauty of the girl in the strange mimic representation of the Enchanted Castle! Certainly, then, he had watched the movement of the pictures with the interest and amusement of childhood. It was odd, also, that the whole thing should recur to him now. Was not he also awakening from a sleep, long enchanted for him by the circumstances of his great wealth and rank? And then – the Beauty!

He stopped in his walk up and down the great room, and his eyes fell upon a photograph in a heavy silver frame studded with uncut turquoises, which stood upon a little table. It was one of Madame Lallie Charles's pictures, in soft grey platinotype, and it represented Lady Constance Camborne. The lovely profile, in its supreme and unflawed beauty, came into his mood as the conception of the fantasy.

Here, here indeed, was the Beauty! and no dream story, etched deep into the imagination, was ever fairer than this.

He looked long and earnestly at the portrait, thinking deeply, now, of something which would mean more to his life than anything else.

Since he had been staying at the Bishop's house he had seen much of the beautiful and radiant society girl. And all he had seen only confirmed him in his admiration for her beauty and her charm.

Curiously enough, though, he remembered that he had found, as he stood there reviewing his experiences, that on some occasions his feelings towards his friend's sister were singularly more passionate than at others. There were times when his blood pulsed through his veins, and his whole being rose up in desire to call this lovely girl his own. There were others when, on the contrary, he admired her from a standpoint which might even be called detached. Why was this? The alterations of feeling were quite plainly marked in his memory. Was it – and a sudden light seemed to flash in his mind – was it that when he had been with Mary Marriott his passion for Lady Constance had cooled for a time? He dismissed the thought impatiently, not liking it, angry that it should have come to him.

Mary was as beautiful in her way as Lady Constance. Her charm was not so explicit, but perhaps it was as great. But, then, Mary Marriott was just an actress, and nobody.

He crushed down the unwelcome thought, for, despite all his new knowledge and experience, the old traditions of his breed and training were strong within him. He was the Duke of Paddington, and his mind must not stray into strange paths!

He was standing in the middle of the room, looking down, and frowning to himself. The subtle scent of the hot-house flowers which were massed in great silver bowls here and there mingled strangely with the sense of warmth from the great fires which had a strangely drowsy influence upon him.

Once more he was within the precincts of the Château dans le Bois Dormant.

"A penny for your thoughts, duke!" cut into his reverie.

He started and looked up.

Lady Constance stood before him, with her radiant smile and wonderful appeal. She swung a little fan of white feathers from one wrist. She wore a long, flowing black crêpe de chine Empire gown, scintillating here and there with rich passementerie embroideries and jet ornamentations. The dress was rich in its simplicity, graceful and flowing, it possessed the art that concealed art, and showed off to wonderful advantage the wearer's youthful beauty and glorious hair, the whiteness of her neck and arms against the shimmer of the black. It had been made by Worth, and only made more explicit the wonderful coronet of corn-ripe hair, surmounting a face as lovely as ever Raphael or Michael Angelo dreamt of and set down upon their canvases. She made an ensemble so sudden in its appearance, so absolutely overwhelming in its appeal, that for one of the first times in his life the duke was taken aback and blushed and stammered like a boy.

"I really do not know," he said at length. "I was in a sort of brown study, Lady Constance!"

"Well," she replied, "the offer of a penny, or should it be twopence? is still open; but if you are not going to deal, as the Americans say, explain to me the meaning of the words 'brown study.'"

"I am afraid that is beyond me, Lady Constance," he returned, smiling, and feeling at ease again.

Just as he spoke Lord Hayle and the bishop entered, and they all went down to dinner.

They sat at a small oval table, and every one was in excellent spirits. The duke's troubles seemed to have left him. He felt exhilarated and stimulated, and a half-formed purpose in his mind grew clearer and clearer as the meal went on.

He would ask the radiant girl opposite him to be his wife.

He would ask her that very night if an opportunity presented itself. She was utterly, overwhelmingly charming. There was nobody like her in society. She was as unique among the high-born girls of the day as Ellen Terry was in the height of her charm and beauty upon the stage, when Charles Reade wrote the famous passage about her.

Yes, nothing could be better. She was like champagne to him – she was the most beautiful thing in the world – at the moment she was the most desirable. The ready influence of her talk and laughter stole into his brain. He was captured and enthralled. He thought that this at last was Love.

For he did not know, being a young man with great possessions, but few experiences, that Love does not come upon the wings of light and laughter, but wears a sable mantle, shot through with fires from heaven. He had never loved, and so he did not know that, when the divine blessing of love is vouchsafed, there is a catch in the throat and the tears start into the eyes.

He talked well and brilliantly, relating his experiences of that afternoon.

"So you see," he said, "I went into my great lonely house by a side door – the butler's door, I believe it is called as a matter of fact, and I found the library very warm and comfortable, and with the man I had appointed to be librarian gone. He apparently had just finished his day's work of cataloguing. He is a scholar of my own college and a very decent chap I have found him. He wanted some paid work during the vacations to help him on towards his career at the bar – he is going to be called as soon as he possibly can. I understand that he is certain for a double first. Already he has got his first in mods. and he will get a first in history, too."

"I know the man," Lord Hayle said. "Poor chap! He does not look too well provided with this world's goods."

"But I thought every one at Paul's," Lady Constance said, "was well-to-do. Is it not quite the nicest college in Oxford?"

"Oh, yes, Connie," Lord Hayle replied, "but don't you see, there are some scholarships upon the Foundation which make it possible for quite poor men to live at Paul's. They are very much out of it, naturally. They cannot live with the other men, and so they form a little society of themselves. Still, it is a jolly good thing for them, I suppose," he concluded rather vaguely, and with the young patrician's slight contempt for, and lack of interest in people, of the class to which Arthur Burnside belonged.

"Well, I like the man well enough – what I have seen of him," the duke continued. "But I made an extraordinary discovery to-day. Upon the writing-table where he had been working was some manuscript. It was obviously the last chapter of a book, and, by Jove! it was a book of the rankest Socialism!"

"Socialism?" said the bishop. "My dear Paddington get rid of the young man at once. Such people ought not to be encouraged!"

"Such people are very charming sometimes, bishop," the duke replied. "You know that I probably owe my life to the chief Socialist of them all – Fabian Rose."

"Well, well," the bishop replied, "I suppose it would be unfair to deprive this young Mr. Burnside of his opportunity. At the same time, I must say it is extraordinary how these pernicious socialistic doctrines are getting abroad. Fabian Rose, and his friends, however personally charming and intellectual they may be – and, of course, I do not deny that some of them are very clever fellows – are doing an amount of harm to the country that is incalculable."

"They are clever," the duke returned, in a somewhat meditative voice; "they are, indeed, clever. This manuscript that I read was certainly a brilliant piece of special pleading, and, as a matter of fact, I don't quite understand what the answer to it can be."

"It does seem hard," Lady Constance said with a little sigh, "that we should have everything, and so many other people have nothing. After all, father, in the sight of God we are all equal, are we not?"

The bishop smiled. "In the sight of God, my dear," he answered, "we are certainly all equal. The soul of one man is as precious as the soul of another. But in this world God has ordained that certain classes should exist, and we must not presume to question His ordinance. Our Lord said: 'Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's.'"

"But what I cannot see," the duke broke in, "is why, when wealth is produced by labour, the people who produce it should have no share in it. Don't think, Lord Camborne, that I am a Socialist, or infected in any way with socialistic doctrines." He spoke more rashly than he knew. "But I should like to know the economic answer to the things which Mr. Rose, and Mr. Conrad, and their friends told me when I was ill."

"The answer," replied the bishop, "is perfectly simple. It is intellect, and not labour, that is the creator of wealth. Let me give you a little example."

As he spoke he placed his elbows upon the table, joined the tips of his fingers together, and looked at his young audience with a suave smile.

"Let me instance the case of a saw!"

"A saw, father?" Lady Constance said. "What on earth has a saw to do with Socialism?"

"Listen," the bishop replied, "and I will tell you. If a saw had not been invented, planks, which are absolutely necessary for the construction of building, and, indeed, for almost all the conveniences of modern life, must be split up out of the trunks of trees by means of wedges, a most clumsy and wasteful method.

"Your labourer says that he produces wealth which the planks make. This, of course, is an absolute fallacy. Labour alone might rend the trunk of a tree into separate pieces, though, to be sure, it would be a difficult business enough. But only labour, working with tools, could split up the trunk of a tree with wedges, saw it with a saw, or cut it with a knife. Don't you see, my dear Connie, labour makes the noise, but it is intellect which is responsible for the tune. Men move by labour, but they only move effectually and profitably by intellect. Labour is the wind, intellect the mill. Though there is as much wind blowing about now as there was three thousand years ago, some of it now grinds corn, saves time, and increases wealth. This difference is due, not to the wind, but to the wiser utilisation of the wind through intellect.

"And the same is true of labour. Without the inventions and the improvements of the few, labour would produce a bare subsistence for naked savages. It could not, however, produce wealth, because wealth is essentially something over and above a bare subsistence. A bare subsistence means consuming as fast as producing; and thus, all that labour does when not enabled to be efficient and profitable by the superior intelligence of the few.

"So that the real truth is that wealth, as such, is something over and above a mere subsistence, and, so far from being due to labour, is rather due to that diminution of toil which enables things to be produced more quickly than they are consumed. But such diminution is due to the time-shortening processes, methods, and inventions of the few. The fact is that the general mass of men are of far too dull and clownish a character to do much for real advancement.

"Any forward step which produces wealth is taken by somebody in particular, and not by everybody in general.

"Of course it is easy enough to copy and profit by inventions and improvements after somebody else has made them."

The bishop stopped, and sipped his glass of Contrexeville, looking with a pleased smile at the young people before him.

No one could talk with a more accurate and sustained flow of English than Lord Camborne. He knew it. The public knew it, and he knew that the public knew it.

From some men such a sustained monologue would have been excessively tedious, even though the people to whom it was addressed were, like Miss Rose Dartle, "anxious for information." In the bishop, however, there was such a blandness and suavity – he was such a handsome old man, and had cultivated the grand manner to such perfection – that he really was able, on all occasions, to indulge in his favourite amusement without boring anybody at all. He was, in short, one of the few men in Europe who could enjoy the pleasure of hearing himself talk at considerable length without an uneasy feeling that, in giving way to his ruling passion, he was not alienating friends.