I gladly live amid the real, And I seek a worthier ideal. Courage, brothers; God is overhead! Ah! you may laugh. But it’s all on my side.” Away she swept, basket and trowel and all. Stop to listen to that gibberish--not she! When her Royal Highness came back to us [in these moods she is the Princess, in her gentler and more pastoral moods she is the Lady Shepherd] she found us deep in another part of the discussion. The business of the Great International League having extinguished the National Debt by a very simple process, the next stall in the Augean stable of existing abomination, as he expressed it, must be dealt with. “Suppose we change the metaphor, my dear Polus, and say the next plank in your platform must be pulled up.” “Pulled up? Quite the contrary. Fixed, firmly fixed, nailed down!” “Be it so! Let us look at the plank. A stall in the stable of abominations suggests dirty work, you know!” The next great problem which the Great International League sets before itself to solve is this: the National Debt being annihilated, how is the accumulation of property to be prevented in the future? I observed that at this point Polus was not so inclined for the monologue form of discussion as before. It was not the Socratic speaking _ex cathedrâ_, as in the _Laws_; there was a quite unusual glad-of-a-hint attitude, as in the _Lysis_ or the _Meno_. “Come,” I said, “I see through you; you haven’t thought it out, and you want me to give you a hint. Which is it to be? Am I to serve as whetstone, or do you come in trouble and pain crying out for τὴν μαιείαν?” He threw up his hands: “Speak, and I will listen.” Then said I, “O Polus, you’re just the man I want. Everybody knows I am a dull old dog, slow of thought and slow of speech as a country bumpkin must be; feeling after my words, and as often as not choosing the wrong ones. But I have been excogitating of late a theory which will supply your next plank to perfection, and in fact would make your fortune as a politician, if indeed the Great League will allow you to have any property, even in your brains. Forty years ago--for there were _thinkers_, my dear Polus, in the waste places of the earth even before you were born--I came across quite a “sublime” scheme of some French financier, propounded, I think, during the Great Revolution, for which the world was not yet ready. The man was before his age, and his own generation pooh-poohed him. I quite forget his name. I quite forget the title of his book if he ever wrote one; and I shall be very much obliged to you if you can find out something about the great man, for a great man he was. When I heard of this scheme I was little more than a lad, and now, after much cogitation, I cannot honestly tell you how much of the plan is his and how much my own. But I’ll give him all the credit for it.”