or you! And think of the things they produce.
Chocolate boxes full of sweets! There was one girl who spent the whole
of her working days in pasting photographs of grinning chorus girls on
to box-lids. I should go mad if I had to look at that soppy grin all day
long...."

Mrs. Graham murmured gently, but her words were not audible. Rachel
would not have heard them if they had been.

"Well," said Gilbert, "what do you want to do about it?"

"I'm a reactionary," Rachel answered. "I'm against all this ... this
progress. We're simply eating up people's lives, and paying meanly for
them. I'd destroy all these factories ... the whole lot. They aren't
worth the price. And I'd go back to decent piggery. What is the good of
a plate when it means that some girl has been poisoned so that it can be
bought cheaply?"

"But we must have plates?" Henry said.

"Why?" she retorted.

"Well!" he rejoined, smiling at her as one smiles at a foolish child.

"Oh, I know," she went on, "you think I'm talking wildly. I've heard all
about your Improved Toryism. Roger's told me about it. You all think
that you are the anointed ones, and that the bulk of people are born to
do what they're told. You won't have whips for your slaves ... you'll
have statutes. You won't sell them ... you'll socialise them. Cogs in
wheels, you'll make them! Oh, it isn't worth while living like that. You
don't even let a man do a whole job ... you only let him do a part of
one, and you're trying to turn him into an automaton more and more every
day. He's to press a button ... and that's all. Presently, he'll _be_ a
button!..."

"My dear Rachel," Roger said, "you don't imagine, do you, that the whole
world's going to turn back to ... piggery as you call it? We've spent
centuries in creating this civilisation...."

"Is it worth while?" she demanded.

"Yes...."

"Prove it," she insisted.

"Well, of course, that's a job, isn't it? I can't prove it in a few
minutes...."

"You can't prove it, Roger," she interrupted. "If all this civilisation
were worth while, you wouldn't need to prove it: it would be obvious.
We'd only have to look out of the door to see the proof."

"I don't say that the factory system is satisfactory at present. It
isn't; but it can be improved...."

"No, it can't, Roger. It's unimprovable. I dare you to go to any model
factory in England and study it with an honest mind and then say that it
is worth while. It makes the people ill ... th