"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?" "I have told you," Maraton answered. "Yes, you have told us," Maxendorf continued. "Supposing there were still a way by which even this present generation could reap the benefit? Are you great enough, Maraton, to listen to me, I wonder? That is what I ask myself since you have become a Party politician, a friend of Ministers, since you have joined in the puppet dance of the world. See to what I have brought my people. In ten years' time I tell you that nearly every industry in my country will be conducted upon a profit-sharing basis." "You have brought them to this," Maraton reminded him swiftly, "by peaceful methods."