"And we are going to get that new England for which you have fought," burst out the other triumphantly. Then with a slight smile he looked at Vane. "We must not forget our surroundings--I see a waiter regarding me suspiciously. Thanks--no; I don't smoke." He traced a pattern idly on the cloth for a moment, and then looked up quickly. "I would like you to try to understand," he said. "Because, as I said, the whole question of possible anarchy as opposed to a constitutional change lies in your hands and the hands of your class." Vane gave a short, incredulous laugh, and shook his head. "In your hands," repeated the other gravely. "You see, Captain Vane, we approach this matter from a fundamentally different point of view. You look around you, and you see men striking here and striking there. And you say 'Look at the swine; striking again!' But there's one thing that you fail to grasp, I think. Underneath all these strikes and violent upheavals, bursting into flame in all sorts of unexpected places--there is the volcano of a vital conflict between two fundamental ideas. Though the men hardly realise it themselves, it's there, that conflict, all the time. . . . And we, who see a little further than the mob, know that it's there, and that sooner or later that conflict will end in victory for one side or the other. Which side, my friend? Yours _or_ ours. . . . Or both. Yours _and_ ours. . . . England's." He paused for a moment as the waiter handed him the coffee. Then he went on--"To the master-class generally there is a certain order of things, and they can imagine nothing else. They employ workers--they pay them, or they 'chuck' them, as they like. They hold over them absolute power. They are kind in many cases; they help and look after their employees. But they are the masters--and the others are the men. That is the only form of society they can conceive of. Any mitigation of conditions is simply a change within the old order. That is one point of view. . . . Now for the other." He turned with a smile to his hostess. "I hope I'm not boring you. . . ." "Why, I'm thrilled to death," she cried, hurriedly collecting her thoughts from an adjacent hat. "Do go on." "The other point of view is this. We do not wish for mitigation of conditions in a system which we consider wrong. We want the entire system swept away. . . . We want the entire propertied class removed. We deny that there are any inherent rights which go with the possession of property; and even if there are, we claim that the rights of the masses far outweigh the property rights of the small minority of owners. . . ." "In other words," said Vane briefly, "you claim for the masses the right to commit robbery on a large scale."