FRANKLYN.  Come!  Confess, both of you!  You were only flies on the wheel.  The war went England’s way; but the peace went its own way, and not England’s way nor any of the ways you had so glibly appointed for it.  Your peace treaty was a scrap of paper before the ink dried on it.  The statesmen of Europe were incapable of governing Europe.  What they needed was a couple of hundred years training and experience:  what they had actually had was a few years at the bar or in a counting-house or on the grouse moors and golf courses.  And now we are waiting, with monster cannons trained on every city and seaport, and huge aeroplanes ready to spring into the air and drop bombs every one of which will obliterate a whole street, and poison gases that will strike multitudes dead with a breath, until one of you gentlemen rises in his helplessness to tell us, who are as helpless as himself, that we are at war again.

CONRAD.  Aha!  What consolation will it be for us then that you two are able to tell off one another’s defects so cleverly in your afternoon chat?

BURGE [angrily] If you come to that, what consolation will it be that you two can sit there and tell both of us off? you, who have had no responsibility! you, who havnt lifted a finger, as far as I know, to help us through this awful crisis which has left me ten years older than my proper age!  Can you tell me a single thing you did to help us during the whole infernal business?

CONRAD.  We’re not blaming you:  you hadnt lived long enough.  No more had we.  Cant you see that three-score-and-ten, though it may be long enough for a very crude sort of village life, isnt long enough for a complicated civilization like ours?  Flinders Petrie has counted nine attempts at civilization made by people exactly like us; and every one of them failed just as ours is failing.  They failed because the citizens and statesmen died of old age or over-eating before they had grown out of schoolboy games and savage sports and cigars and champagne.  The signs of the end are always the same:  Democracy, Socialism, and Votes for Women.  We shall go to smash within the lifetime of men now living unless we recognize that we must live longer.

LUBIN.  I am glad you agree with me that Socialism and Votes for Women are signs of decay.

FRANKLYN.  Not at all:  they are only the difficulties that overtax your capacity.  If you cannot organize Socialism you cannot organize civilized life; and you will relapse into barbarism accordingly.

SAVVY.  Hear, hear!

SURGE.  A useful point.  We cannot put back the clock.

HASLAM. I can.  Ive often done it.

LUBIN.  Tut tut!  My dear Burge:  what are you dreaming of?  Mr Barnabas:  I am a very patient man.  But will you tell me what earthly use or interest there is in a conclusion that cannot be realized?  I grant you that if we could live three hundred years we should all be, perhaps wiser, certainly older.  You will grant me in return, I hope, that if the sky fell we should all catch larks.