"Aurelian," said McCann, "will you tell me straight what you mean when you say that, yet claim to be a socialist? I asked you once before that empty-headed Rip Van Winkle called Strafford Wentworth in the other room, and you made an evasive answer. Now, tell me, how do you reconcile the two?" "Because I believe that political socialism will destroy society and clear the ground for a new life; because it will annihilate the Republic, and make monarchial government possible." "It will destroy neither, but reform them both." "It cannot reform either, for the principles of each are false." "What do you fancy those principles to be?" "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." "Do you dare to call those principles false?" "Liberty and equality false, fraternity impossible so long as the first two pretend to exist." McCann sat bolt upright. "Look here, Aurelian," he said seriously, "I can't talk in this way, I am not that kind of man. What has come over you? I left you a socialist, and I come back and find you an unreasoning royalist, incapable of talking sense, putting your defenceless fancies into the armour of paradox. What in the name of common-sense do you mean by it?" Aurelian turned his handsome head and looked at the red-bearded agitator. "Malcolm," he said gently, "as you would say, we had best have it out. I have changed, but not exactly in the way you think. As I say, I am a socialist but also a royalist, as well as many other things you would think equally bad. I have done a good deal of reading of late, a good deal of thinking; so I have grown,--more than you, for you have only acted. And just that, if you don't mind my saying so, is precisely the trouble with most socialists. Look, this is the situation,"--he sat up with almost animation in his face. "The world is in a bad way, never worse; you taught me that, and the more I study life the more convinced I am of its eternal truth. Reform must come if we are to save this decrepit world from a vain repetition of history; that of course follows from the other assumption. Thus far we walk together; but then arises the question of means, and here we part, for you say reform may be won by agitation, I say man is helpless at the present juncture and can only wait." "Men have not waited before; they have acted and have won." "Yes, for it was dawn and not the eleventh hour." "What do you make of the French Revolution?" "A reform undertaken at the eleventh hour, and therefore merging within three years into hideous deformity,--a reform that failed." "You dare to say that it failed when it destroyed feudalism and the rotten monarchial system?"