The speaker paused impressively. His listeners stirred with relief, but the tide of his speech again washed in upon them.
"They lack," said he, pointing the calabash pipe at Gideon Whipple, sitting patiently across the table from him, "they lack the third eye of wisdom." He paused again, but only as if to await applause. There was no intimation that he had done.
"Dear me!" murmured Gideon, politely. The other Whipples made little sounds of amazement and approval.
"You want to know what the third eye of wisdom is?" continued Dave, as one who had read their secret thought. "Well, it's the simple gift of being able to look at facts as they are instead of twisting 'em about as they ain't. The most of us, savages, uneducated people, simples, and that sort, got this third eye of wisdom without knowing it; we follow the main current without knowing or asking why. But professors and philosophers and preachers and teachers and all holy rollers like socialists ain't got it. They want to reduce the whole blamed cosmos to a system, and she won't reduce. I forget now just how many billion cells in your body"—he pointed the pipe at Sharon Whipple, who stirred uneasily—"but no matter." Sharon looked relieved.
"Anyway, we fought our way up to be a fish with lungs, and then we fought on till we got legs, and here we are. And the only way we got here was by competition—some of us always beating others. Holy rollers like socialists would have us back to one cell and keep us there with equal rewards for all. But she don't work that way. The pot's still a-boiling, and competition is the eternal fire under it.
"Look at all these imaginary Utopias they write about—good stories, too, about a man waking up three thousand years hence and finding everything lovely. But every one of 'em, and I've read all, picture a society that's froze into some certain condition—static. Nothing is! She won't freeze! They can spray the fire of competition with speeches all they like, but they can't put it out. Because why? Well, because this life thing is going on, and competition is the only way it can get on. Call it Nature if you want to. Nature built star dust out of nothing, and built us out of star dust, but she ain't through; she's still building. Old Evolution is still evoluting, and her only tool is competition, the same under the earth and on the earth, the same out in the sky as in these states.
"Of course there's bound to be flaws and injustice in any scheme of government because of this same competition you can't get away from any more than the planets can. There's flaws in evolution itself, only these holy rollers don't see it, because they haven't got the third eye of wisdom; they can't see that the shoemaker is always going to want all he can get for a pair of shoes and always going to pay as little as he can for his suit of clothes, socialism or no socialism.
"What would their one big union be? Take these unions that are striking now all over the country. They think they're striking against something they call capital. Well, they ain't. They're striking against each other. Railroad men striking against bricklayers, shoemakers striking against farmers, machinists striking against cabinetmakers, printers striking against all of 'em—and the fools don't know it; think they're striking against some common enemy, when all the time they're hitting against each other. Oh, she's a grand bit of cunning, this Old Evolution."
"This is all very interesting, Mr. Cowan"—Harvey D. had become uneasy in his chair, and had twice risen to put straight a photograph of the Whipple block that hung on the opposite wall—"but what we would like to get at—"
"I know, I know"—Dave silenced him with a wave of the calabash—"you want to know what it's all about—what it's coming to, what we're here for. Well, I can tell you a little. There used to be a catch in it that bothered me, but I figured her out. Old Evolution is producing an organism that will find the right balance and perpetuate itself eternally. It's trying every way it knows to get these cells of protoplasm into some form that will change without dying. Simple enough, only it takes time. Think how long it took to get us this far out of something you can't see without glasses! But forget about time. Our time don't mean anything out there in the real world. Say we been produced in one second from nothing; well, think what we'll become in another ten seconds. We'll have our balance by that time. This protoplasm does what it's told to do—that's how it made eyes for us to see, and ears to hear, and brains to think with—so by that time we'll be really living; we'll have a form that's plastic, and can change round to meet any change of environment, so we won't have to die if it gets too cold or too hot. We want to live—we all want to live; by that time we'll be able to go on living.