the survival of the fittest, which in
those days was England's moral teaching, had made the country one huge
butcher's shop. Amongst the carcasses of countless victims there had
fattened and grown purple many butchers, physically strengthened by the
smell of blood and sawdust. These had begotten many children. Following
out the laws of Nature providing against surfeit, a proportion of these
children were born with a feeling of distaste for blood and sawdust; many
of them, compelled for the purpose of making money to follow in their
fathers' practices, did so unwillingly; some, thanks to their fathers'
butchery, were in a position to abstain from practising; but whether in
practice or at leisure, distaste for the scent of blood and sawdust was
the common feature that distinguished them. Qualities hitherto but
little known, and generally despised--not, as we shall see, without some
reason--were developed in them. Self-consciousness, aestheticism, a
dislike for waste, a hatred of injustice; these--or some one of these,
when coupled with that desire natural to men throughout all ages to
accomplish something--constituted the motive forces which enabled them to
work their bellows. In practical affairs those who were under the
necessity of labouring were driven, under the then machinery of social
life, to the humaner and less exacting kinds of butchery, such as the
Arts, Education, the practice of Religions and Medicine, and the paid
representation of their fellow-creatures. Those not so driven occupied
themselves in observing and complaining of the existing state of thing.
Each year saw more of their silver cockleshells putting out from port,
and the cheeks of those who blew the sails more violently distended.
Looking back on that pretty voyage, we see the reason why those ships
were doomed never to move, but, seated on the sea-green bosom of that
sea, to heave up and down, heading across each other's bows in the
self-same place for ever. That reason, in few words, was this: 'The man
who blew should have been in the sea, not on the ship.'"

The droning ceased. Hilary saw that Mr. Stone was staring fixedly at his
sheet of paper, as though the merits of this last sentence were
surprising him. The droning instantly began again: "'In social effort,
as in the physical processes of Nature, there had ever been a single
fertilising agent--the mysterious and wonderful attraction known as Love.
To this--that merging of one being