the capitalist comes to regard ostentation as vulgar, and to enjoy a simpler life, will employ fewer and fewer people.  A vast proletariat, beginning with a nucleus of those formerly employed in export trades, with their multiplying progeny, will be out of employment permanently.  They will demand access to the land and machinery to produce for themselves.  They will be refused.  They will break a few windows and be dispersed with a warning to their leaders.  They will burn a few houses and murder a policeman or two, and then an example will be made of the warned.  They will revolt, and be shot down with machine-guns—­emigrated—­exterminated anyhow and everyhow; for the proprietary classes have no idea of any other means of dealing with the full claims of labor.  You yourself, though you would give fifty pounds to Jansenius’s emigration fund readily enough, would call for the police, the military, and the Riot Act, if the people came to Brandon Beeches and bade you turn out and work for your living with the rest.  Well, the superfluous proletariat destroyed, there will remain a population of capitalists living on gratuitous imports and served by a disaffected retinue.  One day the gratuitous imports will stop in consequence of the occurrence abroad of revolution and repudiation, fall in the rate of interest, purchase of industries by governments for lump sums, not reinvestable, or what not.  Our capitalist community is then thrown on the remains of the last dividend, which it consumes long before it can rehabilitate its extinct machinery of production in order to support itself with its own hands.  Horses, dogs, cats, rats, blackberries, mushrooms, and cannibalism only postpone—­”

“Ha! ha! ha!” shouted Sir Charles.  “On my honor, I thought you were serious at first, Trefusis.  Come, confess, old chap; it’s all a fad of yours.  I half suspected you of being a bit of a crank.”  And he winked at Erskine.

“What I have described to you is the inevitable outcome of our present Free Trade policy without Socialism.  The theory of Free Trade is only applicable to systems of exchange, not to systems of spoliation.  Our system is one of spoliation, and if we don’t abandon it, we must either return to Protection or go to smash by the road I have just mapped.  Now, sooner than let the Protectionists triumph, the Cobden Club itself would blow the gaff and point out to the workers that Protection only means compelling the proprietors of England to employ slaves resident in England and therefore presumably—­though by no means necessarily—­Englishmen.  This would open the eyes of the nation at last to the fact that England is not their property.  Once let them understand that and they would soon make it so.  When England is made the property of its inhabitants collectively, England becomes socialistic.  Artificial inequality will vanish then before real freedom of contract; freedom of competition, or unhampered emulation, will keep us moving ahead; and Free Trade will fulfil its promises at last.”