Part 11 (2/2)

WEDGECROFT. What!... and am I to write my prescriptions in English?

TREBELL. Yes, you are.

WEDGECROFT. Lord save us! I never thought to find you a visionary.

TREBELL. Isn't it absurd to think that in a hundred years we shall be giving our best brains and the price of them not to training grown men into the discipline of destruction ... not even to curing the ills which we might be preventing ... but to teaching our children. There's nothing else to be done ... nothing else matters. But it's work for a priesthood.

WEDGECROFT. [_Affected; not quite convinced._] Do you think you can buy a tradition and trans.m.u.te it?

TREBELL. Don't mock at money.

WEDGECROFT. I never have.

TREBELL. But you speak of it as an end not as a means. That's unfair.

WEDGECROFT. I speaks as I finds.

TREBELL. I'll buy the Church, not with money, but with the promise of new life. [_A certain rather gleeful cunning comes over him._] It'll only look like a dose of reaction at first ... Sectarian Training Colleges endowed to the hilt.

WEDGECROFT. What'll the Nonconformists say?

TREBELL. Bribe them with the means of equal efficiency. The crux of the whole matter will be in the statutes. I'll force on those colleges.

WEDGECROFT. They'll want dogma.

TREBELL. Dogma's not a bad thing if you've power to adapt it occasionally.

WEDGECROFT. Instead of spending your brains in explaining it. Yes, I agree.

TREBELL. [_With full voice._] But in the creed I'll lay down as unalterable there shall be neither Jew nor Greek.... What do you think of St. Paul, Gilbert?

WEDGECROFT. I'd make him the head of a college.

TREBELL. I'll make the Devil himself head of a college, if he'll undertake to teach honestly all he knows.

WEDGECROFT. And he'll conjure up Comte and Robespierre for you to a.s.sist in this little _rechauffee_ of their schemes.

TREBELL. Hullo! Comte I knew about. Have I stolen from Robespierre too?

WEDGECROFT. [_Giving out the epigram with an air._] Property to him who can make the best use of it.

TREBELL. And then what we must do is to give the children power over their teachers?

_Now he is comically enigmatic._ WEDGECROFT _echoes him._

WEDGECROFT. And what exactly do you mean by that?

TREBELL. [_Serious again._] How positive a pedagogue would you be if you had to prove your cases and justify your creed every century or so to the pupils who had learnt just a little more than you could teach them? Give power to the future, my friend ... not to the past. Give responsibility ... even if you give it for your own discredit. What's beneath trust deeds and last wills and testaments, and even acts of Parliament and official creeds? Fear of the verdict of the next generation ... fear of looking foolish in their eyes. Ah, we ... doing our best now ... must be ready for every sort of death. And to provide the means of change and disregard of the past is a secret of statesmans.h.i.+p. Presume that the world will come to an end every thirty years if it's not reconstructed. Therefore give responsibility ...

<script>