"I quite agree with you, my dear Lord Orrel," said the prince, as they turned at the end of their walk. "Democracy is tending now, just as it did in the days of Greece and Carthage and Rome, and to-day in my own unhappy France, to degeneration, and the worst of it is that there is no visible possibility of salvation. Our rulers have armed the mob with a weapon more potent than the thunders of Jove. The loafer of the café and the pot-house has a vote, and, therefore, the same voice in choosing the rulers of nations as the student and the man of science, or the traveller who is familiar with many lands and many races. I often think that it is a pity that some means cannot be found for placing--well, I will call it a despotic power--in the hands of a few men--men, for instance, if I may say so without flattery or vanity, like ourselves--men of wide experience and broad sympathies, and yet possessing what you and I know to be the essentials of despotism--that something that can only be inherited, not acquired." "My dear prince, I agree with you entirely," replied Lord Orrel. "Our present civilisation is suffering from a sort of dry-rot. Sentiment has degenerated into sentimentalism, courage into a reckless gambling for honours, statesmanship into politics, oratory into verbosity. In short, the nineteenth century has degenerated into the twentieth. Everything seems going wrong. The world is ruled by the big man who shots his quotations on the Stock Exchange and the little one who serves behind his counter. It is all buying and selling. Honour and faith, and the old social creed which we used to call noblesse oblige, are getting quite out of date." "Not that yet, my friend, surely," the prince interrupted, quickly gripping his companion's arm; "not that, at least, for us. I confess that we and those like us are, as one might say, derelicts on the ocean of society--we, who one day were stately admirals, to use the old phrase. And yet, as you said just now, if only some power could be placed in the hands of a few like ourselves, a power which would over-ride the blind, irresponsible, shifting will of the mutable mob which changes its vote and its opinions with the seasons, the world might be brought again into order, and the proletariat might be saved from its own suicide. "And," he went on, turning at the other end of their promenade, "perhaps you will not believe me, but only a few weeks ago there was such a power in the hands of a Frenchman--of an Alsatian, perhaps I should say, but a man who had preserved his loyalty to France--a scientist of European reputation--a man who had discovered that this earth had a spirit, a living soul, and who could gain control of it--so complete a control, that he could draw it out and leave the earth dead--a man who--But there, I am wearying you; I am sure you must think that I am telling you some fairy tale."