“No. The roundness and motion of the earth are ascertained physical facts. But—I speak with the greatest deference—can you assert it to be a scientific fact that a community of human beings are _a priori_ incapable of managing their own affairs on a basis of social equality?” “Of course I can,” Olivia declared, to the gentle amusement of standers-by. “Human nature won’t allow it. With inequalities of brain and character social equality is impossible.” “Dear Lady”—she hated the apostrophe as he said it and the lift of the eyebrows which caused an upward ripple that was lost in the far reaches of his bald forehead. “Dear Lady,” said he, “in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot you can find every grade of human intellect, from the inbred young aristocrat who is that much removed”—he flicked a finger nail—“from a congenital idiot to the acute-brained statesman; every grade of human character from the lowest of moral defectives to the highest that the present civilization can produce. And yet they are all on a social equality. And why? They started life on a common plane. The same phenomenon exists in a mass-meeting of working-men—in any assemblage of human beings of a particular class who have started life on a common plane. Now, don’t you see, that if we abolished all these series of planes and established only one plane, social equality would be inevitable?” “I don’t see how you’re going to do it.” “Ah! That’s another question. Think of what the task is. To make a clean sweep of false principles to which mankind has subscribed for—what do I know—say—eight thousand years. It can’t be done in a day. Not even in a generation. If you wish to render a pestilence-stricken area habitable, you must destroy and burn for miles around before you can rebuild. Extend the area to a country—to the surface of the civilized globe. That’s the philosophic theory of what is vulgarly called Bolshevism. Let us lay waste the whole plague-stricken fabric of our civilization, so that the world may arise, a new Phœnix, under our children’s hands.” “You have put the matter to Miss Gale with your usual cogency, my dear Roger,” said Dawkins, who had joined the group. “Perhaps now she may take a less flippant view of our activities.” He smiled, evidently meaning to include the neophyte in the sphere of his kind indulgence. But Olivia flushed at the rudeness of his words. Triona who, hidden from Olivia by the standing group, had been stuffed into a sedentary and penitential corner with two assertive women and an earnest young Marxian gasfitter, and had, nevertheless, kept an alert ear on the neighbouring conversation, suddenly appeared once more to her rescue. “Pardon me, sir,” said he, “but to one who has gone through, as I have done, the Bolshevist horrors which you advocate so complacently, it’s your view that hardly seems serious.” “Atrocities, my dear friend,” said the seer-like Dawkins, “are proverbially exaggerated.”