CONRAD [interrupting] It’s not a little program:  it’s an almighty big one.  It’s not our own:  it’s the program of the whole of civilization.

BURGE.  Then why split the party before you have put it to us?  For God’s sake let us have no more splits.  I am here to learn.  I am here to gather your opinions and represent them.  I invite you to put your views before me.  I offer myself to be heckled.  You have asked me only an absurd non-political question.

FRANKLYN.  Candidly, I fear our program will be thrown away on you.  It would not interest you.

BURGE [with challenging audacity] Try.  Lubin can go if he likes; but I am still open to new ideas, if only I can find them.

FRANKLYN [to Lubin] Are you prepared to listen, Mr Lubin; or shall I thank you for your very kind and welcome visit, and say good evening?

LUBIN [sitting down resignedly on the settee, but involuntarily making a movement which looks like the stifling of a yawn] With pleasure, Mr Barnabas.  Of course you know that before I can adopt any new plank in the party platform, it will have to reach me through the National Liberal Federation, which you can approach through your local Liberal and Radical Association.

FRANKLYN.  I could recall to you several instances of the addition to your party program of measures of which no local branch of your Federation had ever dreamt.  But I understand that you are not really interested.  I will spare you, and drop the subject.

LUBIN [waking up a little] You quite misunderstand me.  Please do not take it in that way.  I only—­

BURGE [talking him down] Never mind the Federation:  I will answer for the Federation.  Go on, Barnabas:  go on.  Never mind Lubin [he sits down in the chair from which Lubin first displaced him].

FRANKLYN.  Our program is only that the term of human life shall be extended to three hundred years.

LUBIN [softly] Eh?

BURGE [explosively] What!

SAVVY.  Our election cry is ‘Back to Methuselah!’

HASLAM.  Priceless!

Lubin and Surge look at one another.

CONRAD.  No.  We are not mad.

SAVVY.  Theyre not joking either.  They mean it.

LUBIN [cautiously] Assuming that, in some sense which I am for the moment unable to fathom, you are in earnest, Mr Barnabas, may I ask what this has to do with politics?

FRANKLYN.  The connection is very evident.  You are now, Mr Lubin, within immediate reach of your seventieth year.  Mr Joyce Surge is your junior by about eleven years.  You will go down to posterity as one of a European group of immature statesmen and monarchs who, doing the very best for your respective countries of which you were capable, succeeded in all-but-wrecking the civilization of Europe, and did, in effect, wipe out of existence many millions of its inhabitants.