There was a silence. Struthers looked out of the window as if he didn’t know what to say next, and he played irritably with a blotter on the desk, with his right hand. Richard also sat uncomfortably silent. “Nowhere any spunk?” said Struthers, in his flat, metallic voice. “No,” said Richard. And again the uncomfortable silence. “There was plenty of spunk in the war,” said Struthers. “Of a sort. And because they felt they _had_ to, not from choice.” “And mayn’t they feel they _have_ to again?” said Struthers, smiling rather grimly. The two men eyed one another. “What’ll make them?” asked Richard. “Oh--circumstances.” “Ah well--if circumstances.” Richard was almost rude. “I know if it was a question of _war_ the majority of returned soldiers would join up in a month--in a week. You hear it over and over again from the Diggers here. The war was the only time they ever felt properly alive. But then they moved because they hated the Germans--self-righteously hated them. And they can’t quite bring it off, to hate the capitalist with a self-righteous hate. They don’t hate him. They know that if they themselves got a chance to make a pile of money and be capitalists, they’d _jump_ at it. You can’t work up a hate, except on fear. And they _don’t_ fear the capitalist, and you can’t make them. The most they’ll do is sneer about him.” Struthers still fidgetted with the blotter, with his thin, very-red, hairy hand, and abstractedly stared at the desk in front of him. “And what does all that mean, in your estimation, Mr Somers?” he asked dryly, looking nervously up. “That you’ll never get them to act. You’ll never get Labour, or any of the Socialists, to make a revolution. They just won’t act. Only the Anarchists might--and they’re too few.” “I’m afraid they are growing more.” “Are they? Of that I know nothing. I should have thought they were growing fewer.” Mr Struthers did not seem to hear this. At least he did not answer. He sat with his head dropped, fingering the blotter, rather like a boy who is being told things he hates to hear, but which he doesn’t deny. At last he looked up, and the fighting look was in the front of his eyes.