Part 20 (1/2)
After a considerably long pause he said, slowly--”Well, 'master of the world' is a pretty tall order! Now, look here, Seaton--you're a plain, straight man, and so am I, as much as my business will let me. What are you after, anyway? What is your aim and end? You say you don't want money--yet money is the chief goal of all men's ambition. You don't care for fame, though you could have it for the lifting of a finger, and I suppose you don't want love--”
Seaton laughed heartily, pus.h.i.+ng back with a ruffling hand the thick hair from his broad open brow.
”All three propositions are nil to me”--he said--”I suppose it is because I can have them for the asking! And what satisfaction is there in any one of them? A man only needs one dinner a day, a place to sleep in and ordinary clothes to wear--very little money is required for the actual necessaries of life--enough can be earned by any day-labourer.
As for fame--whosoever reads the life of even one 'famous' man will never be such a fool as to wish for the capricious plaudits of a fool-public. And love!--love does not exist--not what _I_ call love!”
”Oh! May I have your definition?”
”Why yes!--of course you may! Love, to my thinking, means complete harmony between two souls--like two notes that make a perfect chord.
The man must feel that he can thoroughly trust and reverence the woman,--the woman must feel the same towards the man. And the sense of 'reverence' is perhaps the best and most binding quality. But nowadays what woman will you find worth reverence?--what man so free from drink and debauchery as to command it? The human beings of our day are often less respectable than the beasts! I can imagine love,--what it might be--what it should be--but till we have a very different and more spiritualised world, the thing is impossible.”
Again, Gwent was silent for some minutes. Then he said--
”Apparently the spirit of destructiveness is strong in you. As 'master of the world'--to quote your own words, I presume that in the event of a nation or nations deciding on war, you would give them a time-limit to consider and hold conference, with their allies--and then--if they were resolved to begin hostilities--”
”Then I could--and WOULD--wipe them off the face of the earth in twenty-four hours!” said Seaton, calmly--”From nations they should become mere dust-heaps! War makes its own dust-heaps, but with infinitely more cost and trouble--the way of exit I offer would be cheap in comparison!”
Gwent smiled a grim smile.
”Well, I come back to my former question”--he said--”Suppose the occasion arose, and you did all this, what pleasure to yourself do you foresee?”
”The pleasure of clearing the poor old earth of some of its pestilential microbes!”--answered Seaton, ”Something of the same thankful satisfaction Sir Ronald Ross must have experienced when he discovered the mosquito-breeders of yellow fever and malaria, and caused them to be stamped out. The men who organise national disputes are a sort of mosquito, infecting their fellow-creatures with perverted mentality and disease,--they should be exterminated.”
”Why not begin with the newspaper offices?” suggested Gwent--”The purlieus of cheap journalism are the breeding-places of the human malaria-mosquito.”
”True! And it wouldn't be a bad idea to stamp them out,” here Seaton threw back his head with the challenging gesture which was characteristic of his temperament--”But what is called 'the liberty of the press'(it should be called 'the license of the press') is more of an octopus than a mosquito. Cut off one tentacle, it grows another.
It's entirely octopus in character, too,--it only lives to fill its stomach.”
”Oh, come, come!” and Gwent's little steely eyes sparkled--”It's the 'safe-guard of nations' don't you know?--it stands for honest free speech, truth, patriotism, justice--”
”Good G.o.d!” burst out Seaton, impatiently--”When it does, then the 'new world' about which men talk so much may get a beginning! 'Honest free speech--truth!' Why, modern journalism is one GREAT LIE advertised on h.o.a.rdings from one end of the world to the other!”
”I agree!” said Gwent--”And there you have the root and cause of war!
No need to exterminate nations with your destructive stuff,--you should get at the microbes who undermine the nations first. When you can do THAT, you will destroy the guilty and spare the innocent,--whereas your plan of withering a nation into a dust-heap involves the innocent along with the guilty.”
”War does that,”--said Seaton, curtly.
”It does. And your aim is to do away with all chance or possibility of war for ever. Good! But you need to attack the actual root of the evil.”
Seaton's brow clouded into a frown.
”You're a careful man, Gwent,”--he said--”And, in the main, you are right. I know as well as you do that the license of the press is the devil's finger in the caldron of affairs, stirring up strife between nations that would probably be excellent friends and allies, if it were not for this 'licensed' mischief. But so long as the mob read the lies, so long will the liars flourish. And my argument is that if any two peoples are so brainless as to be led into war by their press, they are not fit to live--no more fit than the mosquitoes that once made Panama a graveyard.”
Gwent smoked leisurely, regarding his companion with unfeigned interest.
”Apparently you haven't much respect for life?” he said.
”Not when it is diseased life--not when it is perverted life;”--returned Seaton--”Then it is mere deformity and enc.u.mbrance.
For life itself in all its plenitude, health and beauty I have the deepest, most pa.s.sionate respect. It is the outward ray or reflex of the image of G.o.d--”