k comfortably in his chair.

"What's wrong with the paper, Mr. Verriman?" said Ben, pleasantly.

Eddie did not love the adventure of mental combat, but he was no
coward. "It seems to me," he said, "that it preaches such radical
changes in our government that it is seditious. To be frank, Mr.
Moreton, I think the government ought to suppress it."

"But we don't break the law. The government can't suppress us."

"Then the laws ought to be changed so that it can."

"That's all we advocate, Mr. Verriman, the changing of the law. It
isn't any more seditious for me to say it than for you to, is it?"

Of course in Eddie's opinion it was--much, much more seditious. Only
somehow it was a difficult point to make clear, if a person was so
wrongheaded he couldn't see it for himself. The point was that he,
Eddie, was right in wanting the laws changed and Moreton was wrong.
Anyone, it seemed to Eddie, would agree to that, unless he happened
to agree with Moreton beforehand, and those were just the people who
ought to be deported, imprisoned, or even perhaps in rare instances,
as examples, strung up to lamp-posts. Only each time he tried to put
these very natural opinions in words, they kept sounding wrong and
tyrannical and narrow--qualities which Eddie knew he was entirely
without. In order to counteract this effect, he tried at first to
speak very temperately and calmly, but, unhappily, this only had the
effect of making him sound patronizing to Ben's ears.

In short, it was hardly to be expected that the discussion would be
amicable, and it was not. Each man began to be angry in his own way.
Eddie shouted a little, and Ben expressed himself with turns of phrase
quite needlessly insulting. Ben found Verriman's assumption that the
profits of capital were bound up with patriotism, family life, and
the Christian religion almost as irritating as Verriman found Ben's
assumption that the government of labor as a class would be entirely
without the faults that have always marked every form of class
government.

"And suppose you got socialism," said Eddie, at last, "suppose you did
divide everything up equally, don't you suppose that in a few years
the clever, strong, industrious men would have it all in their own
hands?"

"Very likely," said Ben, "but that would be quite a change from the
present arrangement, wouldn't it?"

Mr. Cord had a narrow escape from laughing out loud, which would have
cost him the friendship of the man