"I'd put 'em in a sanatorium until they got their nerves patched up, and then I'd turn 'em over to a trainer who'd put them into a normal physical condition; and then I'd put 'em at hard labor--every last one of 'em." "Oh, dear, Mr. Kirkpatrick, would you?" "Yes," he said grimly. "It 'ud be their turn." CHAPTER XI I She walked down the avenue with him, listening to his angry account of the great coal strike in West Virginia, where the families of miners in their beds had been fired on from armored motor cars, and both strikers and civilians were armed to the teeth. "That's the kind of war--civil war--we can't prevent--not yet. No wonder some of us want quick action and turn into I.W.Ws. Of course they're fools, just poor boobs, to think they can win out that way, but you can't blame 'em. Lord, if we only _could_ move a little faster. If Marx had been a good prophet we'd have the socialized state to-day. Things didn't turn out according to Hoyle. Lots of the proletariat ain't proletariat any longer, instead of overrunning the earth; and in place of a handful of great capitalists to fight we've a few hundred thousand little capitalists, or good wage earners with white collars on, that have about as much use for socialism as they have for man-eating tigers. I'm thinking about this country principally. Too much chance for the individual. Trouble is, the individual, like as not, don't know what's good for him and goes under, like the man you've been telling me about." "There's only one thing I apprehend in your socialistic state," said Alexina, who always became frivolous when Kirkpatrick waxed serious, "and that is universal dissolution from sheer ennui. Either that or we'll go on eternally rowing about something else. Earth has never been free from war since the beginning of history, and there is trouble of some sort going on somewhere all the time--" "All due to capitalism." "Capitalism hasn't always existed." "Human greed has, and the dominance of the strong over the weak." "Exactly, and socialism if she ever gets her chance will dominate all she knows how. Remember what you said just now about forcing the pampered women to work when they were the underdog. But the point is that Nature made Earthians a fighting breed. She must have had a good laugh when we named another planet Mars." "Well, we'll fight about worthier things." "Don't be too sure. We fight about other things now. All the trouble in the world isn't caused by money or the want of it. And what about the religious wars--" III It was at this inopportune moment that they met Mortimer. If Alexina had remembered that this was his homing hour she would have parted from her visitor at the drawing-room door; but in truth she had dismissed Mortimer from her mind.