"I mean that, if you are right, I ought to be a sun worshipper, and sit daily at dawn on top of my tower yonder, warming my hands against the glow of children's faces, trooping to school. Whereas the little beggars run wild and rob my orchards, and I don't remember at this moment my parish schoolmaster's name." The Inspector bethought him of the broken bridge in his friend's life--the bridge by which men cross over from self into love of a new generation-- and was silent. "But look here," Sir George went on, "the fun was your preaching the doctrine in that temple. You didn't know the man who built it. He died a week or two ago; a man of character, I tell you, and a big fellow, too, in his way." "I have heard of this Rosewarne. All I know of him is that he's to be thanked for the best-fitted school, for its size, in all Cornwall. I'm not talking of expense merely; he used thought, down to the details. When you begin to study these things, you recognise thought, down to the raising or lowering of a desk, or the screws in a cupboard. You don't get your fittings right by giving _carte blanche_ to a wholesale firm." "Of course you don't. But what, think you, had the man in view? I tell you, Jack, you are a fossil beside him. You talk of making good citizens, quite in the old Hellenic style. Oh yes, I recognised the incurable Aristotle in your exhortation, though you _did_ address it to two score of rustic British children. But, my dear fellow, you are a philosopher in a barbarian's court, and your barbarian has been reading his Darwin. Where you see a troop of little angels--" "_Non Angeli sed Angli_," the Inspector put in, with a smile. "Where you behold a vision, then, of little English citizens growing up to serve the State, he saw a horde of little struggle-for-lifers climbing on each other's backs; and these fellows--that son of his, and the parson-- will follow his line by instinct. They don't reason; but Darwin and the rest have flung them on the scent of selfishness, and they have a rare nose for self. Struggle-for-life or struggle-for-creed, the scent is the same, and they're hot upon it." "Think of these last fifty years of noble reform. Is England going back upon herself--upon the spirit, for instance, that raised Italy, freed the slave, and cared for the factory child?" "To be sure she will. She has found a creed to vindicate the human brute, and the next generation--mark my words--will be predatory. Within twenty years we shall be told that it is inevitable the weak should suffer to enrich the strong; we shall accept the assurance, and our poets will hymn it passionately."