"I can see so far as you. 'Tis you put coloured spectacles on your nose to make things look as you'd have 'em. Your book be played out, master. Let the childer read it, if you like, along with the other fairy tales; but don't think grown men be going to waste their time with it. The whole truth is that the book be built on a lie. There never was no Jehovah and never will be. Moses invented Him to frighten the folk from their naughtiness, same as you invent a scarecrow to frighten the birds from the seed. And the scarecrow works better than Jehovah did, by all accounts." "You talk out of your narrow, bitter books, Jack." "No need to call my books names. That's all your side can do. Why don't they try to answer 'em instead of blackguarding 'em?" "'Tis a great danger to the poor that they begin to think so much." "Don't you say that. Knowledge be the weapon the poor have been waiting for all these years and years. 'Tis the only weapon for a poor man. And what will it soon show 'em? It'll show 'em that the most powerful thing on this earth be the poor. They are just going to find it out; then you rich people will hear of something that will terrible astonish you." "You're a rank Socialist, Jack. I've no patience with you." "There you are: 'no patience!' But that's another thing we men of the soil be going to teach you chaps who own the soil. 'Patience,' you say. There's a time coming when the rich people will have to be mighty patient, I warn you! And if you're impatient--why, 'tis all one to us, for never was heard that any impatient man could stop the tide flowing." "I believe that," said Baskerville grimly. "You'll pay us presently for teaching you, and clothing you, and helping to enlarge your minds. When you're learned enough, you'll turn round, like the snake, and bite the hand that fed you. Gratitude the common soul never knows and never will, whatever else it may learn. Knowledge is poison to low natures, and we ought to have kept you ignorant and harmless." Jack Head stared. "That's a pretty speech!" he said. "That's a good healthy bit of Christian charity--eh? Why for should you ax so much credit for your side? Take me. What's the rich man done for me? A workhouse boy I was." "And look at you now--a prosperous man and saving money. Who fed you and taught you and brought you up? The State. Society saved you; society played mother to you; and now you want to kick her. That's how you'd pay your debts. You take a base and a narrow view--dishonest too. The State have got to look after the rich as well as the poor. Why not? The poor aren't everybody. You're the sort that think no man can be a decent member of society unless he was born in a gutter. Class prejudice 'tis called, and some of the chaps who think they're the salt of the earth, stink of it."