“An illusion!” Selingman interrupted, with a sudden fierceness in his tone.  “Once, Maraton, you looked at life sanely enough.  Are you sure that to-day you have not put on the poisoned spectacles?  Don’t you know the end of these spasmodic reforms?  You pass, your influence passes, your mantle is buried in your grave, and the country slips back, and the people suffer, and the great wheel grinds them into bone and powder just as surely a century hence as a century ago.  Man, you don’t start right.  If you would restore a ruined and neglected garden, you must first destroy, make a bonfire of the weeds prepare your soil.  Then, in the springtime, fresh flowers will blossom, the trees will give leaf, the birds who have deserted a ruined and fruitless waste will return and sing once more the song of life.  But there must be destruction, Maraton.  You yourself preached it once, preached fire and the sword.  Something has gone from you since those days.  Compromise—­the spirit of compromise you call it.  How one hates the sound of it!  Bah!  Man, you are on a lower level, when you talk the smug talk of to-day.  I am disappointed in you.  Maxendorf is disappointed in you.  You are riding down the easy way on to the sandbanks of failure.”

“Your garden,” Maraton rejoined, with an answering note of passion in his tone, “would never have blossomed again if you had driven the plough across it, ripped up its fruit trees, torn up its neglected plants by ruthless force.  You must plant fresh seed and grow new trees.  Then there’s another nation, another world.  What about your responsibilities to the present one?  Isn’t it great to save what is, rather than to destroy for the sake of those who have neither toiled nor suffered?  I thought as you once.  The philosopher thinks like that in his study.  Stand before those people, look into their white, labour-worn faces, feel with them, sorrow with them for a little time, and I tell you that your hand will falter before it drives the plough.  You will raise your eyes to heaven and pray that you may see some way of bringing help to them—­to them who live—­the help for which they crave.  Haven’t they a right to their lives?  Who gives us a mandate to sweep them away for the sake of the unborn?”

“You have become a sentimentalist, Maraton,” Maxendorf declared grimly.  “The soft places in your heart have led you to forget for a moment the inexorable laws.  Let us pass from these generalities.  Let us speak of things such as you had at first intended.  I know what was in your heart.  You meant to pass from Birmingham to Glasgow, to preach the holy war of Labour, a giant crusade.  You meant to close the mills, to stop the wheels, to blank the forges and rake out the furnaces of the country.  You meant to place your finger upon its arteries and stop their beating.  You meant to turn the people loose upon their oppressors.  Though they must perish in their thousands, yet you meant to show them the naked truth, to show them of what they are being deprived, to show them the irresistible laws of justice, so that for very shame they must drop their tools and stand for their rights.  Why didn’t you do it?”