"It will be the direct result of a higher standard of public health."
He spoke briskly, as one making a business proposition.
"Health!" echoed Ethan sharply—"health of the public conscience, I suppose you mean."
"Health of the body first of all," growled the prophet. "Health mental and moral as the natural result. But since the Maker of the world established the physical basis æons before he bothered about the soul, the first thing we have to do is to make strong our foundations, since for ages we've systematically neglected them, when we haven't occupied ourselves in actively undermining them. The halt, the blind, the diseased, are not for this New Jerusalem. Its first condition of citizenship will be mens sana in corpore sano. And the beauty of it is that, to attain this health, no one man's welfare will avail. All men must share it, or all men are menaced. It means a perfect Socialism."
"Ah, Socialism!"
"Not the travesty that masquerades with banners and brass bands, and issues pamphlets against property; but the Socialism that is the true science of life, and that will make possible the men I see in the future."
Ethan regarded the rapt look of the seer with a kindly cynicism. The absent eyes of the elder fell upon the critical young face with a gleam of suspicion. Again and again since his arrival something in Ethan's easy, lounging attitudes had not only roused an obscure antagonism in the older man, but had seemed the most irritating expression of his nephew's habit of mind. His nonchalant grace seemed to say with smiling superiority: "What's your hurry? Why should I exert myself? Let the other man walk." John Gano, looking at him now, felt, in addition to the unreasoning rage at Ethan's laissez aller way of taking life, a kind of half-morbid, half-fanatical desire to prick the young man into action, into some likeness to that desperate American strenuousness that had died so hard with John Gano.
"The men I'm thinking of aren't grown in arm-chairs or under glass, any more than they are made in filthy workshops or in thieves' alleys; they are the sons of happy, voluntary toil, and pure air, and honest dealing."
"Ah," said Ethan, "very likely."