“I perfectly agree with you, sir,” Gumbril answered. If he had been wearing his beard, he would have gone on to suggest that loquacious old gentlemen in trains are among the supernumeraries of the planet. As it was, however he spoke with courtesy, and smiled in his most engaging fashion. “When I look at all these revolting houses,” the old gentleman continued, shaking his fist at the snuggeries of the season-ticket holders, “I am filled with indignation. I feel my spleen ready to burst, sir, ready to burst.” “I can sympathize with you,” said Gumbril. “The architecture is certainly not very soothing.” “It’s not the architecture I mind so much,” retorted the old gentleman, “that’s merely a question of art, and all nonsense so far as I’m concerned. What disgusts me is the people inside the architecture, the number of them, sir. And the way they breed. Like maggots, sir, like maggots. Millions of them, creeping about the face of the country, spreading blight and dirt wherever they go; ruining everything. It’s the people I object to.” “Ah well,” said Gumbril, “if you will have sanitary conditions that don’t allow plagues to flourish properly; if you will tell mothers how to bring up their children, instead of allowing nature to kill them off in her natural way; if you will import unlimited supplies of corn and meat: what can you expect? Of course the numbers go up.” The old gentleman waved all this away. “I don’t care what the causes are,” he said. “That’s all one to me. What I do object to, sir, is the effects. Why sir, I am old enough to remember walking through the delicious meadows beyond Swiss Cottage, I remember seeing the cows milked in West Hampstead, sir. And now, what do I see now, when I go there? Hideous red cities pullulating with Jews, sir. Pullulating with prosperous Jews. Am I right in being indignant, sir? Do I do well, like the prophet Jonah, to be angry?” “You do, sir,” said Gumbril, with growing enthusiasm, “and the more so since this frightful increase in population is the world’s most formidable danger at the present time. With populations that in Europe alone expand by millions every year, no political foresight is possible. A few years of this mere bestial propagation will suffice to make nonsense of the wisest schemes of to-day—or would suffice,” he hastened to correct himself, “if any wise schemes were being matured at the present.” “Very possibly, sir,” said the old gentleman, “but what I object to is seeing good cornland being turned into streets, and meadows, where cows used to graze, covered with houses full of useless and disgusting human beings. I resent seeing the country parcelled out into back gardens.” “And is there any prospect,” Gumbril earnestly asked, “of our ever being able in the future to support the whole of our population? Will unemployment ever decrease?” “I don’t know, sir,” the old gentleman replied. “But the families of the unemployed will certainly increase.”