“I can,” said Mrs. Averil. “Too many of my friends had their sons and husbands killed in South Africa.”
“And it’s human nature,” said Mrs. Chadwick, eating her strawberries mournfully. “Like the poor: whom you have always with you, you know.”
“Human nature is altered already a good deal more than governments imagine,” said Palgrave, “and they’ll find themselves pretty well dished if they try to bring on a capitalist war now. The workers all over the world are beginning to see whose the hands are that pull the strings and they’ll refuse to dance to their piping. They’ll down weapons just as they’ve learned, at last, to down tools; and without them you can do nothing. That’s the way human nature will end war.”
“A spirited plan, no doubt,” said Oldmeadow, “and effective if all the workers came to be of the same mind simultaneously. But if those of one country downed weapons and those of another didn’t, the first would get their throats cut for their pains.”
“It’s easy to sneer,” Palgrave retorted. “As a matter of principle, I’d rather have my throat cut by a hired ruffian than kill an innocent man—even if he did belong to a nation that happened to be cleverer and more efficient than my own. That’s a crime, of course, that we can’t forgive.”
“Don’t talk such rot, Palgrave,” Barney now remarked in a tone of apathetic disgust.
“I beg your pardon,” Palgrave sat up instantly, flushing all over his face. “I think it’s truth and sanity.”
“It’s not truth and sanity. It’s rot and stupid rot,” said Barney. “Some more tea, please, Barbara.”
“Calling names isn’t argument,” said Palgrave. “I could call names, too, if it came to that. It’s calling names that is stupid. I merely happen to believe in what Christ said.”
“Oh, but, dear—Christ drove the money-lenders out of the Temple very, very roughly,” Mrs. Chadwick interposed with the head-long irrelevance characteristic of her in such crises. “Thongs must hurt so much, mustn’t they? He surely believed in punishing people who did wrong.”