rapped between two
halftruths, and broken. He wanted to be a pure Christian, one and equal
with all men. He even wanted to give away all he had, to the poor. Yet
he was a great promoter of industry, and he knew perfectly that he must
keep his goods and keep his authority. This was as divine a necessity
in him, as the need to give away all he possessed--more divine, even,
since this was the necessity he acted upon. Yet because he did NOT act
on the other ideal, it dominated him, he was dying of chagrin because
he must forfeit it. He wanted to be a father of loving kindness and
sacrificial benevolence. The colliers shouted to him about his
thousands a year. They would not be deceived.

When Gerald grew up in the ways of the world, he shifted the position.
He did not care about the equality. The whole Christian attitude of
love and self-sacrifice was old hat. He knew that position and
authority were the right thing in the world, and it was useless to cant
about it. They were the right thing, for the simple reason that they
were functionally necessary. They were not the be-all and the end-all.
It was like being part of a machine. He himself happened to be a
controlling, central part, the masses of men were the parts variously
controlled. This was merely as it happened. As well get excited because
a central hub drives a hundred outer wheels or because the whole
universe wheels round the sun. After all, it would be mere silliness to
say that the moon and the earth and Saturn and Jupiter and Venus have
just as much right to be the centre of the universe, each of them
separately, as the sun. Such an assertion is made merely in the desire
of chaos.

Without bothering to THINK to a conclusion, Gerald jumped to a
conclusion. He abandoned the whole democratic-equality problem as a
problem of silliness. What mattered was the great social productive
machine. Let that work perfectly, let it produce a sufficiency of
everything, let every man be given a rational portion, greater or less
according to his functional degree or magnitude, and then, provision
made, let the devil supervene, let every man look after his own
amusements and appetites, so long as he interfered with nobody.

So Gerald set himself to work, to put the great industry in order. In
his travels, and in his accompanying readings, he had come to the
conclusion that the essential secret of life was harmony. He did not
define to himself at all clearly what harmony was. T