ried Lully, "but why take the longest, the most difficult road?
You say that people are sheep; they must be driven. I say that you and I
and our American friends here are not sheep. We are capable of standing
alone, of judging all for ourselves, and we are just ordinary people
like anyone else."

"Oh, but look at us, Lully!" interrupted Merrier. "We are too weak and
too cowardly ..."

"An example," said Martin, excitedly leaning across the table. "We none
of us believe that war is right or useful or anything but a hideous
method of mutual suicide. Have we the courage of our own faith?"

"As I said," Merrier took up again, "I have too little faith to be an
anarchist, but I have too much to believe in religion." His tin cup
rapped sharply on the table as he set it down.

"No," Lully continued, after a pause, "it is better for man to worship
God, his image on the clouds, the creation of his fancy, than to worship
the vulgar apparatus of organised life, government. Better sacrifice his
children to Moloch than to that society for the propagation and
protection of commerce, the nation. Oh, think of the cost of government
in all the ages since men stopped living in marauding tribes! Think of
the great men martyred. Think of the thought trodden into the dust....
Give man a chance for once. Government should be purely utilitarian,
like the electric light wires in a house. It is a method for attaining
peace and comfort--a bad one, I think, at that; not a thing to be
worshipped as God. The one reason for it is the protection of property.
Why should we have property? That is the central evil of the world....
That is the cancer that has made life a hell of misery until now; the
inflated greed of it has spurred on our nations of the West to throw
themselves back, for ever, perhaps, into the depths of savagery.... Oh,
if people would only trust their own fundamental kindliness, the
fraternity, the love that is the strongest thing in life. Abolish
property, and the disease of the desire for it, the desire to grasp and
have, and you'll need no government to protect you. The vividness and
resiliency of the life of man is being fast crushed under organisation,
tabulation. Over-organisation is death. It is disorganisation, not
organisation, that is the aim of life."

"I grant that what all of you say is true, but why say it over and over
again?" Andre Dubois talked, striding back and forth beside the table,
his arms gesticulating. His