“That’s history, Treplin, as you know. If these foolish, timid capitalists and leaders of men who are searching their petty souls for a remedy to combat the ravages of the modern disease called Socialism only would read history intelligently, they would find the remedy made to order. Fight! War! Give the lower brutes war; let ’em get out and slaughter one another, and they’d soon forget their pitiful, clumsy attempts to think for themselves. Give them guns with a little sharp steel on the end of the barrel, turn them loose on each other—any excuse would do—and they’d soon be so busy driving said steel into one another’s thick bodies that the leaders could slip the yoke back on their necks and get ’em under hand again, where they belong. “And they’d be happier, too, because a man-brute has got to have so much fighting, or what he calls his brain begins to trouble him; and then he imagines he has a soul and is otherwise unhappy. If there is fighting, or the certain prospect of fighting, there’s no alleged thinking. There’s the solution of all difficulties with the lower orders. Of course you’ve noticed how perfectly contented and happy the men in this camp are?” he laughed, turning suddenly on Toppy. “Yes,” said Toppy. “Especially Rosky and his bunch.” The Snow-Burner smiled appreciatively. “Rosky, poor clod, hadn’t had any fighting. I’d overlooked him. Had I known that thoughts had begun to trouble his poor, half-ox brain, I’d have given him some fighting, and he’d have been as content for the next few weeks as a man who—who’s just been through delirium tremens. “He had no object in life, you see. If he’d had a good enemy to hate and fight, he wouldn’t have been troubled by thoughts, and consequently he wouldn’t now be lying in his bunk with his leg in splints. “There is the system in a nutshell—give a man an enemy to hate and wish to destroy, and he won’t be any trouble to you during working-hours or after. That’s what I do—pick out the ones who might get restless and set them to hating each other. And now,” he concluded, as they reached the gate and passed through, “you’ll have a chance to see how it works out.” The big gate, opened for them by two armed guards, swung shut behind them, and Toppy once more looked around the enclosure in which he had had his first glimpse of the Snow-Burner’s system of handling the men under him. The place this morning, however, presented a different, a more impressive scene. It was all but filled with a mass of rough-clad, rough-moving, rough-talking male humanity.