ree from illusions than I am.
If you tell me that these good things can be done, I am the last one
to dispute you. But I have seen near at hand experiments of exceptional
importance, on a very grand scale, and the result does not encourage me.
I come to doubt indeed if money has any such power in these affairs
as we think it has--for that matter, if it has any power at all.
The shifting of money can always disorganize what is going on at the
moment--change it about and alter it in many ways--but its effect is
only temporary. As soon as the pressure is released, the human atoms
rearrange themselves as they were before, and the old conditions return.
I think the only force which really makes any permanent difference is
character--and yet about even that I am not sure. The best man I have
ever known--and in many respects the ablest--devoted untold energy and
labour, and much money, too, to the service of a few thousand people in
Somerset, on land of his own, upon a theory wonderfully elaborated and
worked out. Perhaps you have heard of Emanuel Torr and his colony, his
System?"

Thorpe shook his head.

"He had worked tremendously for years at it. He fell ill and went
away--and in a day all the results of his labours and outlay were flat
on the ground. The property is mine now, and it is farmed and managed
again in the ordinary way, and really the people there seem already
to have forgotten that they had a prophet among them. The marvelous
character of the man--you look in vain for any sign of an impress that
it left upon them. I never go there. I cannot bear those people. I have
sometimes the feeling that if it were feasible I should like to oppress
them in some way--to hurt them."

"Oh! 'the people' are hogs, right enough," Thorpe commented genially,
"but they ARE 'the people,' and they're the only tools we've got to work
with to make the world go round."

"But if you leave the world alone," objected the Duke, "it goes round
of itself. And if you don't leave it alone, it goes round just the
same, without any reference whatever to your exertions. Some few men are
always cleverer or noisier or more restless than the others, and
their activity produces certain deviations and peculiarities in their
generation. The record of these--generally a very faulty and foolish
record--we call history. We say of these movements in the past that some
of them were good and some were bad. Our sons very likely will differ
totally from us