w
the end of these spasmodic reforms? You pass, your influence passes,
your mantle is buried in your grave, and the country slips back, and the
people suffer, and the great wheel grinds them into bone and powder just
as surely a century hence as a century ago. Man, you don't start right.
If you would restore a ruined and neglected garden, you must first
destroy, make a bonfire of the weeds prepare your soil. Then, in the
springtime, fresh flowers will blossom, the trees will give leaf, the
birds who have deserted a ruined and fruitless waste will return and
sing once more the song of life. But there must be destruction,
Maraton. You yourself preached it once, preached fire and the sword.
Something has gone from you since those days. Compromise--the spirit of
compromise you call it. How one hates the sound of it! Bah! Man, you
are on a lower level, when you talk the smug talk of to-day. I am
disappointed in you. Maxendorf is disappointed in you. You are riding
down the easy way on to the sandbanks of failure."

"Your garden," Maraton rejoined, with an answering note of passion in
his tone, "would never have blossomed again if you had driven the plough
across it, ripped up its fruit trees, torn up its neglected plants by
ruthless force. You must plant fresh seed and grow new trees. Then
there's another nation, another world. What about your responsibilities
to the present one? Isn't it great to save what is, rather than to
destroy for the sake of those who have neither toiled nor suffered? I
thought as you once. The philosopher thinks like that in his study.
Stand before those people, look into their white, labour-worn faces,
feel with them, sorrow with them for a little time, and I tell you that
your hand will falter before it drives the plough. You will raise your
eyes to heaven and pray that you may see some way of bringing help to
them--to them who live--the help for which they crave. Haven't they a
right to their lives? Who gives us a mandate to sweep them away for the
sake of the unborn?"

"You have become a sentimentalist, Maraton," Maxendorf declared grimly.
"The soft places in your heart have led you to forget for a moment the
inexorable laws. Let us pass from these generalities. Let us speak of
things such as you had at first intended. I know what was in your
heart. You meant to pass from Birmingham to Glasgow, to preach the holy
war of Labour, a giant crusade. You meant to close the mills, to stop
the wheels,