village atheist and the first cornet in the local Salvation
Army band meet on the village green and shake hands. You take your
school children, your Bible class under the Cowper-Temple clause, into
the museum. You shew the kids the Piltdown skull; and you say, 'Thats
Adam. Thats Eve's husband.' You take the spectacled science student
from the laboratory in Owens College; and when he asks you for a truly
scientific history of Evolution, you put into his hand The Pilgrim's
Progress. You--[_Savvy and Haslam explode into shrieks of merriment_].
What are you two laughing at?

SAVVY. Oh, go on, Mr Burge. Dont stop.

HASLAM. Priceless!

FRANKLYN. Would thirty years of office for the Liberal Party seem so
important to you, Mr Burge, if you had another two and a half centuries
to live?

BURGE [_decisively_] No. You will have to drop that part of it. The
constituencies wont swallow it.

LUBIN [_seriously_] I am not so sure of that, Burge. I am not sure that
it may not prove the only point they will swallow.

BURGE. It will be no use to us even if they do. It's not a party point.
It's as good for the other side as for us.

LUBIN. Not necessarily. If we get in first with it, it will be
associated in the public mind with our party. Suppose I put it forward
as a plank in our program that we advocate the extension of human life
to three hundred years! Dunreen, as leader of the opposite party, will
be bound to oppose me: to denounce me as a visionary and so forth. By
doing so he will place himself in the position of wanting to rob the
people of two hundred and thirty years of their natural life. The
Unionists will become the party of Premature Death; and we shall become
the Longevity party.

BURGE [_shaken_] You really think the electorate would swallow it?

LUBIN. My dear Burge: is there anything the electorate will not swallow
if it is judiciously put to them? But we must make sure of our ground.
We must have the support of the men of science. Is there serious
agreement among them, Doctor, as to the possibility of such an evolution
as you have described?

CONRAD. Yes. Ever since the reaction against Darwin set in at the
beginning of the present century, all scientific opinion worth counting
has been converging rapidly upon Creative Evolution.

FRANKLYN. Poetry has been converging on it: philosophy has been
converging on it: religion has been converging on it. It is going to
be the religion of the twentieth century: a r