ely
over the whole place, and they had injured nothing. They had stopped
the engines, but they had not even disabled them. Here too manifestly a
majority of the people were, like White and Benham, merely lookers-on.

"But this is the most civilized rioting," said Benham. "It isn't
rioting; it's drifting. Just as things drifted in Moscow. Because nobody
has the rudder....

"What maddens me," he said, "is the democracy of the whole thing. White!
I HATE this modern democracy. Democracy and inequality! Was there ever
an absurder combination? What is the good of a social order in which the
men at the top are commoner, meaner stuff than the men underneath, the
same stuff, just spoilt, spoilt by prosperity and opportunity and the
conceit that comes with advantage? This trouble wants so little, just
a touch of aristocracy, just a little cultivated magnanimity, just an
inkling of responsibility, and the place might rise instantly out of all
this squalor and evil temper.... What does all this struggle here amount
to? On one side unintelligent greed, unintelligent resentment on the
other; suspicion everywhere....

"And you know, White, at bottom THEY ALL WANT TO BE DECENT!

"If only they had light enough in their brains to show them how.
It's such a plain job they have here too, a new city, the simplest
industries, freedom from war, everything to make a good life for men,
prosperity, glorious sunshine, a kind of happiness in the air. And
mismanagement, fear, indulgence, jealousy, prejudice, stupidity, poison
it all. A squabble about working on a Saturday afternoon, a squabble
embittered by this universal shadow of miner's phthisis that the masters
were too incapable and too mean to prevent.

"Oh, God!" cried Benham, "when will men be princes and take hold of
life? When will the kingship in us wake up and come to its own?... Look
at this place! Look at this place!... The easy, accessible happiness!
The manifest prosperity. The newness and the sunshine. And the silly
bitterness, the rage, the mischief and miseries!..."

And then: "It's not our quarrel...."

"It's amazing how every human quarrel draws one in to take sides.
Life is one long struggle against the incidental. I can feel my anger
gathering against the Government here in spite of my reason. I want to
go and expostulate. I have a ridiculous idea that I ought to go off to
Lord Gladstone or Botha and expostulate.... What good would it do?
They move in the magic circle