He had called upon me shortly after his arrival, his ostensible reason being my work among his mill-people.  I think he liked me, later.  At any rate, I had seen much of him, and I was indebted to him for more than one shrewd and practical suggestion.  If at times I was chilled by what seemed to me a ruthless and cold-blooded manner of viewing the whole great social question I was nevertheless forced to admire the almost mathematical perfection to which he had reduced his system.

“But you wish to deal with human beings as with figures in a sum,” I objected once.

“Figures,” he smiled equably, “are only stubborn—­on paper.  When they’re alive they’re fluid and any clever social chemist can reduce them to first principles.  It’s really very simple, as all great things are:  When in doubt, reach the stomach! There you are!  That’s the universal eye-opener.”

“My dear friend,” he added, laughing, “don’t look so horrified. I didn’t make things as they are.  Personally, I might even prefer to say, like Mr. Fox in the old story, ’It was not so.  It is not so.  And God forbid it should be so!’ But I can’t, truthfully, and therefore—­I don’t.  I accept what I can’t help.  Self-preservation, we all admit, is the first law of nature.  Now I consider myself, and the class I represent, as beings much more valuable to the world than, let’s say, your factory-hands, your mill-workers, your hewers of wood and drawers of water.  Thus, should the occasion arise, I should most unhesitatingly use whatever weapons law, religion, civilization itself, put into my hands, without compunction and possibly what some cavilers might call without mercy; having at stake a very vital issue—­the preservation of my kind, the protection of my class against Demos.”

He spoke without heat, calmly, looking at me smilingly with his fine intelligent eyes:  there was even much of truth in his frank statement of his case.  Always has Dives spoken thus, law-protected, dining within; while without the doors of the sick civilization he has brought about, Lazarus lies, licked by the dogs of chance.  No, this man was advocating no new theory; once, perhaps, I might have argued even thus myself, and done so with a clean conscience.  This man was merely an opportunist.  I knew he would never “reach their stomachs” unless he thought he had to.  Indeed, since his coming, things had changed greatly at the mills, and for the better.

“The day of the great god Gouge,” he had said to Inglesby, “is passing.  It’s bad business to overwork and underpay your hands into a state of chronic insurrection.  That means losing time and scamping work.  The square deal is not socialism nor charity nor a matter of any one man’s private pleasure or conscience—­it’s cold hard common sense and sound scientific business.  You get better results, and that’s what you’re after.”

Perhaps it was because Appleboro offered, at that time, very little to amuse and interest that keen mind of his, that the Butterfly Man amused and interested Hunter so much.  Or perhaps, proud as he was, even he could not wholly escape that curious likableness which drew men to John Flint.