Braintree’s black eyes flashed; not with rage, but with joy; because he knew now that he was understood.
“Ah, now you’re talking sense,” he said. There were some present to whom it seemed almost as much of a liberty to tell Lord Eden he was talking sense as to tell him he was talking nonsense. But he himself was quite subtle enough to understand that he had really been paid a compliment.
“But if you take that line,” went on Braintree, “you can’t complain of the people you separate in that way, treating themselves as something separate. If there is a class like that, you can hardly wonder at its being class-conscious.”
“And the other people, I suppose, have a right to be class-conscious, too,” said Eden with a smile.
“Quite so,” observed Wister in his more spacious manner. “The aristocrat, the magnanimous man as Aristotle says–”
“Look here,” said Braintree rather irritably, “I’ve only read Aristotle in cheap translations; but I have read them. It seems to me gentlemen like you first learn elaborately how to read things in Greek; and then never do it. Aristotle, so far as I can understand, makes out the magnanimous man to be a pretty conceited fellow. But he never says he must be what you call an aristocrat.”
“Quite so,” said Eden, “but the most democratic of the Greeks believed in slavery. In my opinion, there’s a lot more to be said for slavery than there is for aristocracy.”
The Syndicalist assented almost eagerly; and Mr. Almeric Wister looked rather bewildered.
“I say,” repeated Braintree, “that if you think there ought to be slaves, you can’t prevent the slaves hanging together and having their own notions about things. You can’t appeal to their citizenship if they are not citizens. Well, I’m one of the slaves. I come out of the coal-cellar. I represent all those grimy and grubby and unpresentable people; I am one of them. Aristotle himself couldn’t complain of my speaking for them.”
“You speak for them very well,” said Eden.