"You're all a pack of simpletons and bounders, still moist behind the ears, Warren. The whole lot of you. I've been in New York three days and I've begun to feel that there isn't a remotely intelligent human animal in the place. I'm going to retreat inland. In Chicago, at least, people know enough to keep their mouths shut. I'll tell you what the trouble is in a nutshell. People want things straight again. They want black and white so's they can all mass on the white side and make faces at the evil-doers who prefer the black. They don't want facts, diagnosis, theories, interpretations, reports. They want somebody to stand up and announce in a loud, clear voice, 'Tweedledum is wrong. Tweedledee is right, everything else to the contrary is Poppycock.' Thus they'd be able to put an end to their own thinking and bury themselves in their own little alleys and be happy again. You know as well as I, it makes them miserable to think. Restless, irritable, indignant. It's like having bites--the more they're scratched the worse they itch. It's the war, of course. The war has been a failure. The race has caught itself red-handed in a lie. Now everybody is running around trying to confess to everybody else that what he said in the past was a lie and that the real truth is as follows. And there's where the trouble begins. There ain't no such animal." "I see," said Lockwood, smiling. "Yes, you do," Dorn grinned. "You don't see anything. The trouble is ... oh, well, the trouble is as I said that the human race is out in the open where it can get a good look at itself. The war raised a curtain...." "What about the radicals, though? They seem to be saying something definite?" "Yes, shooting one another down by the thousands in Berlin--as they will some day in New York. Yes, the radicals are definite enough.... The revolution rumbling away in Germany isn't a standup fight between Capital and Labor. It's Radical _versus_ Radical. Just as the war was Imperialist _versus_ Imperialist. One of the outstanding lessons of the last decade is the fact that the world's natural enemies haven't yet had a chance at each other, being too busy murdering among themselves. It's coming, though. Another tableau. All this hysteria and uncertainty will gradually simmer down into another right-and-wrong issue--with life boiling away as always under a black and white surface." "Do you think we're going to go red here?" Lockwood asked pensively.