e end of the afternoon, thousands of blackened,
slightly distorted human beings with red mouths, all moving subjugate
to his will. He pushed slowly in his motor-car through the little
market-top on Friday nights in Beldover, through a solid mass of human
beings that were making their purchases and doing their weekly
spending. They were all subordinate to him. They were ugly and uncouth,
but they were his instruments. He was the God of the machine. They made
way for his motor-car automatically, slowly.

He did not care whether they made way with alacrity, or grudgingly. He
did not care what they thought of him. His vision had suddenly
crystallised. Suddenly he had conceived the pure instrumentality of
mankind. There had been so much humanitarianism, so much talk of
sufferings and feelings. It was ridiculous. The sufferings and feelings
of individuals did not matter in the least. They were mere conditions,
like the weather. What mattered was the pure instrumentality of the
individual. As a man as of a knife: does it cut well? Nothing else
mattered.

Everything in the world has its function, and is good or not good in so
far as it fulfils this function more or less perfectly. Was a miner a
good miner? Then he was complete. Was a manager a good manager? That
was enough. Gerald himself, who was responsible for all this industry,
was he a good director? If he were, he had fulfilled his life. The rest
was by-play.

The mines were there, they were old. They were giving out, it did not
pay to work the seams. There was talk of closing down two of them. It
was at this point that Gerald arrived on the scene.

He looked around. There lay the mines. They were old, obsolete. They
were like old lions, no more good. He looked again. Pah! the mines were
nothing but the clumsy efforts of impure minds. There they lay,
abortions of a half-trained mind. Let the idea of them be swept away.
He cleared his brain of them, and thought only of the coal in the under
earth. How much was there?

There was plenty of coal. The old workings could not get at it, that
was all. Then break the neck of the old workings. The coal lay there in
its seams, even though the seams were thin. There it lay, inert matter,
as it had always lain, since the beginning of time, subject to the will
of man. The will of man was the determining factor. Man was the archgod
of earth. His mind was obedient to serve his will. Man's will was the
absolute, the only absolute.