“Well, Mr. Derwent, I wish you success in your mission. Civilization has got to go, one way or another; and I don’t know that it matters much which. I confess that your way strikes me as rather a novel one. Most of your radical friends, however, if what you say be their true aim, show a singular predilection for atheism, free-love, and omitting their daily baths.” With which climax and a slight yawn, Wemyss walked over and joined the group in the other corner. John Haviland had for a long time been silent; but now he spoke. “I am afraid, Mr. Derwent,” said he, “that I so far agree with Mr. Wemyss as to feel that three essentials of civilization are so bound up together that with leaving either one we may lose the rest--I mean, my right to my property, my right to my wife, and my right to personal liberty. The same radicalism which, on the one hand, sets up a tyranny of majority government to tell me what I shall think, what I shall eat, what I shall spend, is that which, on the other hand, tends to the age of reason and the regulation of property out of existence, and women’s rights to lose themselves as women, and absolute liberty of divorce. Property and marriage and personal liberty--they go together. There is no argument for freedom but the inner light of the mind; none for monogamy but that it seems farther from the beasts; none for property but that man creates it for himself. And the age of reason, which denies a divine sanction, will yet require a divine sanction for all that it does not destroy.” “Man does not create the air, nor the ocean, nor the surface of the earth,” said Derwent. “No; and man does not hold the surface of the earth for himself, but for all humanity. Is it not better that you should make a garden of a hundred acres than that it should lie a common waste? You hold it, not for yourself, but in general trust; sooner or later, if you fail to make the land bear fruit for all of us, it will be taken from you. If you are not a good steward for the people, you will, sooner or later, fail. Christ said ‘Sell that thou hast, and give to the poor;’ but is it not doing the same thing to keep what I have, and use it for the poor?” Derwent paused a moment; and before he could reply, Wemyss came back. “Shall we join the ladies?” said he. All the gentlemen got up, some hastily finishing their coffee, others taking a last whiff of their cigars. “He paid twenty thousand,” said Van Kull, hurriedly, to Birmingham. “He bought him for the Duval stables.” CHAPTER XVIII. A DAY’S PLEASURE.