FRANKLYN.  Were you fair to him when you won an election on the program of hanging him?

SURGE.  Stuff!  I am the last man alive to hang anybody; but the people wouldnt listen to reason.  Besides, I knew the Dutch wouldnt give him up.

SAVVY.  Oh, don’t start arguing about poor old Bill.  Stick to our point.  Let these two gentlemen settle the question for themselves.  Mr Burge:  do you think Mr Lubin is fit to govern England?

SURGE.  No.  Frankly, I dont.

LUBIN [remonstrant] Really!

CONRAD.  Why?

BURGE.  Because he has no conscience:  thats why.

LUBIN [shocked and amazed] Oh!

FRANKLYN.  Mr Lubin:  do you consider Joyce Burge qualified to govern
England?

LUBIN [with dignified emotion, wounded, but without bitterness] Excuse me, Mr Barnabas; but before I answer that question I want to say this.  Burge:  we have had differences of opinion; and your newspaper friends have said hard things of me.  But we worked together for years; and I hope I have done nothing to justify you in the amazing accusation you have just brought against me.  Do you realize that you said that I have no conscience?

BURGE.  Lubin:  I am very accessible to an appeal to my emotions; and you are very cunning in making such appeals.  I will meet you to this extent.  I dont mean that you are a bad man.  I dont mean that I dislike you, in spite of your continual attempts to discourage and depress me.  But you have a mind like a looking-glass.  You are very clear and smooth and lucid as to what is standing in front of you.  But you have no foresight and no hindsight.  You have no vision and no memory.  You have no continuity; and a man without continuity can have neither conscience nor honor from one day to another.  The result is that you have always been a damned bad minister; and you have sometimes been a damned bad friend.  Now you can answer Barnabas’s question and take it out of me to your heart’s content.  He asked you was I fit to govern England.

LUBIN [recovering himself] After what has just passed I sincerely wish I could honestly say yes, Burge.  But it seems to me that you have condemned yourself out of your own mouth.  You represent something which has had far too much influence and popularity in this country since Joseph Chamberlain set the fashion; and that is mere energy without intellect and without knowledge.  Your mind is not a trained mind:  it has not been stored with the best information, nor cultivated by intercourse with educated minds at any of our great seats of learning.  As I happen to have enjoyed that advantage, it follows that you do not understand my mind.  Candidly, I think that disqualifies you.  The peace found out your weaknesses.

BURGE.  Oh!  What did it find out in you?

LUBIN.  You and your newspaper confederates took the peace out of my hands.  The peace did not find me out because it did not find me in.