Whom or what class he meant by "they" it is merciful to his ignorant prejudices to leave unrevealed.
CHAPTER XVIII.
BY AN OVERSIGHT OF SOCIETY'S.
François Gaspard was a pleasant and cheerful man, good company, and genial to his neighbours and comrades, but it may be doubted whether Society had not made a grave mistake in not hanging him at the earliest opportunity. In his younger days he had lived in perpetual warfare against Society, its institutions and constitutions—a warfare that he carried on without scruple and without quarter: he would have had no cause for complaint had he been dealt with on this basis of his own choosing. Society, however, had chosen to fancy that it could reform François, or, failing that, could keep him alive and yet harmless. Thanks to this sanguine view, he found himself, at the age of forty-five, a free man in New Lindsey; and, thinking that he and his native country had had about enough of one another, he had enrolled himself as a subject of her Majesty, and had plunged into the affairs of his new home with his usual energy. François was not indeed quite the
man he had been in his palmy time, his nerve was not so good, and his life was more comfortable, and therefore not so lightly to be risked; but he had made no renunciations, and often regretted that New Lindsey was a barren soil, wherein the seed he sowed bore little fruit. He could not be happy without a secret society, and that he had established in Kirton; but it was, he ruefully admitted, hardly more than a toy, a mockery, the merest simulacrum. The members displayed no alacrity; they were but five all told, besides himself: a bookseller's assistant, a watchmaker (he was a German, but the larger cause harmonised all differences), two artisans, and—what is either natural or strange, according to one's estimation of parliamentary government—a doorkeeper in the Houses of Parliament. They used to meet at Gaspard's lodgings, regret, in tones as loud as prudence permitted, the abuses of the status quo, spend a social evening, and return to the outer world with a tickling sense of mystery and potential destructiveness. Gaspard held the very lowest opinion of them; he acknowledged that the "propaganda by action" took small root in New Lindsey, and when it came into his head that Mr. Benham was worse than superfluous, he admitted with a shrug the great difficulties that lay in the way of removing his acquaintance. A man could not do everything by himself, the matter was after all not very pressing, and he almost made up his mind to let Mr. Benham live. Such was the chain
of his reflections, and if Society had clearly realised the way he looked at such things, it can hardly be supposed that Gaspard would have been left unhanged.
Nevertheless, almost academic as the question was, Gaspard indulged his humour by hinting to his associates that, in certain contingencies, there might be work for their hands. He would not be more explicit, for he was distrustful of them; but this vague hint was quite enough to cause some perturbation. The bookseller's assistant turned rather pale, and expressed a preference for waiting till one final, decisive, and overwhelming blow could be struck. He was understood to favour a wholesale massacre at Government House, but reminded his hearers of the dangers of hasty action. The watchmaker was strong on the division of functions: one man was valuable in counsel, another in the field; he belonged, he said, to the former category. The artisans smiled broadly over their drink, and openly declared that the President must "give 'em a lead." The doorkeeper reinforced this suggestion by reminding them that he was a husband and father, whereas Gaspard was a bachelor. All united in asking for further information, and were annoyed when Gaspard referred them to the rule governing such associations as theirs, namely, that the member to carry out the deed, if resolved upon, should be designated before the nature of the deed was discussed, or its desirability finally decided. If this
were not so, he pointed out, a member's opinion on the merits of the scheme might be biased by the knowledge that he would, if fate so willed, have to carry it out. According to his rule, the designated member had no vote.