“What they say, Mr. Wemyss,” cried Derwent, fiercely, “is this: Instead of the vulgar democracy of crass possession, let us have the noble aristocracy of merit, mind, and soul. Let no man excel by owning the souls and bodies, the waking and the sleeping, the getting up and the lying down of his fellow-men. And this whether it be done directly, by chattel slavery, or more secretly and dangerously, by corporate control, monopoly of land, monopoly of that fateful thing that men call capital. Money is the devil’s counters; a treasure accursed, thrice cursed when welded into the ring of power, like that fabled Rhine-gold, which only he may win who for it lays aside all love, both human and divine. Let men enjoy the light of the earth, the noble teachings of art and letters, the health of the body and the freedom of the soul; but these without the virus of self-appropriation. It is this that makes barbarism; it is not civilization. Look at your Yankee money-grubbers; they give, and greedily, ten thousand dollars for a common painting, which they may ostentatiously make their own; they would hesitate to give a dollar for Dante’s Divine Comedy, if he wrote to-day, because--of course, they do not care for it--and they cannot lock it up as theirs and bar it from their fellow-men. And even if, as you insinuate, the future were to be what you call barbarism, the morning chase of the free savage after the wild creature on whom he feeds is more ennobling than the grimy greed of a stunted humanity for these counters that are worthless in themselves. I have seen Australia and Hawaii, and I have seen Sheffield and East London; and I say, better a thousand-fold the heathen savagery than such Christian civilization as are these.” “I have hitherto failed to observe, among socialists or knights of labor, or their wives,” said Wemyss, dryly, “any newer or other impulse than a rising desire for these same counters that you scoff at, or the gin and brass jewellery that they may purchase with them.” “Ay,” cried Lionel Derwent, “you have seen little yet but a blind, instinctive striving for the drugs and poisons you have fed them on; for the treasure you have kept, and welded to the ring of tyranny that held them down. So, when you lift a stone from the ground, or hurl the roof from some long-lived-in Bastile of humanity, the sudden sunlight streams in, and the prisoners, poor insects that they are, crushed by a thousand years of oppression, blinded, dazzled by the light of heaven, grope vainly and mechanically for the things of earth they have been wonted to, and which want and custom and your own example have taught them, too, to prize. No, they are not better than you are, yet; not until their souls have come to life that you so long have robbed them of. But give us light and love, and the word of Christ, and we will see. But, as I said in the beginning, your priests have tortured even this to suit their ends.”