BURGE.  Less than a million.

FRANKLYN.  That was our loss alone.

BURGE.  Oh, if you count foreigners—!

HAS LAM.  God counts foreigners, you know.

SAVVY [with intense satisfaction] Well said, Bill.

FRANKLYN.  I am not blaming you.  Your task was beyond human capacity.  What with our huge armaments, our terrible engines of destruction, our systems of coercion manned by an irresistible police, you were called on to control powers so gigantic that one shudders at the thought of their being entrusted even to an infinitely experienced and benevolent God, much less to mortal men whose whole life does not last a hundred years.

BURGE.  We won the war:  don’t forget that.

FRANKLYN.  No:  the soldiers and sailors won it, and left you to finish it.  And you were so utterly incompetent that the multitudes of children slain by hunger in the first years of peace made us all wish we were at war again.

CONRAD.  It’s no use arguing about it.  It is now absolutely certain that the political and social problems raised by our civilization cannot be solved by mere human mushrooms who decay and die when they are just beginning to have a glimmer of the wisdom and knowledge needed for their own government.

LUBIN.  Quite an interesting idea, Doctor.  Extravagant.  Fantastic.  But quite interesting.  When I was young I used to feel my human limitations very acutely.

BURGE.  God knows I have often felt that I could not go on if it had not been for the sense that I was only an instrument in the hands of a Power above us.

CONRAD.  I’m glad you both agree with us, and with one another.

LUBIN.  I have not gone so far as that, I think.  After all, we have had many very able political leaders even within your recollection and mine.

FRANKLYN.  Have you read the recent biographies—­Dilke’s, for instance—­which revealed the truth about them?

LUBIN.  I did not discover any new truth revealed in these books, Mr Barnabas.

FRANKLYN.  What!  Not the truth that England was governed all that time by a little woman who knew her own mind?

SAVVY.  Hear, hear!

LUBIN.  That often happens.  Which woman do you mean?

FRANKLYN.  Queen Victoria, to whom your Prime Ministers stood in the relation of naughty children whose heads she knocked together when their tempers and quarrels became intolerable.  Within thirteen years of her death Europe became a hell.

SURGE.  Quite true.  That was because she was piously brought up, and regarded herself as an instrument.  If a statesman remembers that he is only an instrument, and feels quite sure that he is rightly interpreting the divine purpose, he will come out all right, you know.

FRANKLYN.  The Kaiser felt like that.  Did he come out all right?

SURGE.  Well, let us be fair, even to the Kaiser.  Let us be fair.