But now Boon and Wilkins were fairly launched upon a vital and entirely inconclusive controversy. Was the thought process of the world growing, spreading, progressing, or was it going to pieces? The one produced a hundred instances of the enlarging and quickening of men's minds, the other replied by instancing vulgarities, distortions, wide acceptance of nonsense. Did public advertisements make a more intelligent or less intelligent appeal now than they used to do? For half an afternoon they fought over the alleged degeneration of the _Times_, multiplying instances, comparing the "Parnellism and Crime" pamphlet with Lord Northcliffe's war indiscretions, and discussing the comparative merits of Mr. Moberly Bell's campaign to sell the twenty-year-old "Encyclopædia Britannica" and found a "Book Club" that should abolish booksellers, with the displayed and illustrated advertisements of the new period. The talk, you see, went high and low and came to no conclusion; but I think that on the whole Wilkins did succeed in shaking Boon's half-mystical confidence in the inevitableness of human wisdom. The honours, I think, lay with Wilkins. Boon did seem to establish that in physical science there had been, and was still, a great and growing process; but he was not able to prove, he could only express his faith, that the empire of sanity was spreading to greater and more human issues. He had to fall back upon prophecy. Presently there would be another big lunge forward, and so forth. But Wilkins, on his side, was able to make a case for a steady rotting in political life, an increase in loudness, emptiness, and violence in the last twenty years: he instanced Carsonism, the methods of Tariff Reform, the vehement Feminist movement, the malignant silliness of the "rebel" Labour Press, the rankness of German "patriotism."... "But there are young people thinking," said Boon at last. "It isn't just these matured showings. Where one youth thought thirty years ago, fifty are thinking now. These wild, loud things are just an irruption. Just an irruption...." The mocker was distressed. The idea of active intellectual wrongness distressed him so much that he cast aside all his detachment from Hallery, and showed plainly that to this imaginary Hallery's idea of a secular growth of wisdom in mankind he himself was quite passionately clinging.... § 4 He was so distressed that one day he talked about it to me alone for some time.