“Never mind, my lord, the thing is done, and you have awakened the consciousness of our English artists. Look down Parliament Street, where your mind’s eye saw, a minute ago, the pantomime of Government; you can see our ancient seat of Parliament transformed into the sanctuary of technical education. The old lobbies are swarming with efficient teachers. Public education, as it was to be found in our old haunts of Eton, Rugby, etc., etc., was the proper training for privileged classes; but the present education, which is not compulsory, is the training of the child and adult without social barriers; and the only religious dogma which he must live up to is this: that the welfare of all is the welfare of each.”
“And yet,” sadly remarked Sinclair, “science is still but empiric, as it has not yet revealed to us the mystery of the human heart; that remains a sealed letter. Some writer has named that mysterious recess of individuality, ‘the hidden garden’; but how ignorant we still are of its vegetation. Do we know what causes, in that hidden garden of the soul, a lovely rose to grow where the soil was barren; or a toadstool to sprout where the seed of a robust plant had been sown?”
“No, we know no more of each other’s inner souls than the early Britons knew of steam and electricity,” said Lionel. “As long as we have not reached complete consciousness we shall never triumph over the inconsistencies which place men on different platforms, and spur them on to fight unfair battles.”
“Ah, my lord, you have a receptive mind, and I knew, from the beginning, that the day would come when you would open your eyes to the gulf which separates man from man. Yesterday morning the Committee of Music Hall Artists introduced at our meeting a queer sort of man, who struck me as visionary in his ideas, and matter-of-fact in the carrying out of his plans.”
“Surely, Dan, he was an American,” remarked Sinclair, “for the gift of bottling the ocean, or of cramming into a nutshell all the contradictory philosophical theories, belongs to that race which unites the creative power of a Jupiter to the jugglery of a mountebank.”
“What that man, be he god or charlatan, suggests is too grave to be spoken of lightly or to be taken up in a minute,” continued Danford, “and I implore your lordship not to jump too quickly at a conclusion. But, to come to facts, this man avers that he has discovered the means of reading human thoughts and secret motives just as clearly as one sees the hidden structure of a body by means of the X-rays. He says that we have, owing to our normal hygiene and purity of life, arrived at the time when this invention will be necessary to bring perfect happiness to human beings; and that our past weeks of paradisaical existence have changed John Bull and made him thirst for a complete knowledge of his fellow-creatures. This is a serious matter, gentlemen, and, for God’s sake, do not let us wreck the future bliss of the world through our incautiousness. You have done much for John Bull, my lord, but you have done it chiefly by being tactful with him, and by not ruffling his susceptibilities. After all, man is a strange being: he clings to the prejudices which makes his life a living purgatory; and you must first see John Bull develop a craving to investigate the ‘hidden garden’ before the final reform of man by man can be effected from within.”
“Let us curb our enthusiasm for the sake of John Bull,” buoyantly exclaimed Lionel, “and let us turn back, Danford. It is getting late, and I have to be at the old War Office to meet ex-Field-Marshal Burlow, to discuss with him what is to be done with the old offices.”
“My lord!” and Danford put his hand on Lionel’s shoulder, “an idea has just struck me! You can do a good turn to the American Seer, by giving over to him the War Office for his scientific experiments. What could be more fitted to the science which is devoted to the extension of sympathy, than the dwelling in which was planned the extermination of races?”
“My dear man, the Seer shall have the old rookery, if I have a voice in the matter, although I fear the shadows of past victims and the remembrance of foregone civilised warfare will lurk at every corner, and interfere with his humanising studies.”
“Quite the contrary,” said Sinclair. “The Seer, if he is what we think, is sure to be stimulated by the ghosts of barbaric civilisations, and his sense of humour will make him chuckle at the irony of fate, which selected him to metamorphose Janus’s eyrie into a temple of love and peace.”