“Precisely!” Donna Beatrice exclaimed, triumphantly. “In the practical brute kingdom as well as in the human world dreamers are likely to come to grief.”
“That is true,” Mario agreed, “and yet the dreamer’s airy product often becomes a reality. The dream of yesterday is the architect’s plan of to-day on which the builders will be at work to-morrow. There was our great compatriot who dreamed of having the people of Italy pull together under some well-laid plan, and do away with the necessity that drives so many to seek prosperity in foreign lands. That man is dead, but part of his vision lives in the Social Dairy. The farmers whose lot has been bettered by this system of co-operation are stout believers in that dream, you may be sure.”
“In what way are the farmers benefited?” Donna Beatrice asked, sceptically.
“They get a fair share of the profit of their toil. They send their milk here, and by processes that are moral as well as scientific it is turned first into butter, then into coin of the realm.”
“But, Signor Forza,” Donna Beatrice protested, “I call this establishment eminently practical.”
“Everyone does now. Nevertheless, it was no more than a theory two years ago—as much a dream then as the Employers’ Liability bill is now.”
“Will you interpret this new dream, Honourable?” Don Riccardo asked. “What is the Employers’ Liability bill?”
“A Parliamentary measure to oblige the employers of men and women in dangerous work to insure their lives; to take care of them, too, should they meet with injury.”
“Then the industrial army,” said Don Riccardo, “would fare better at the hands of the state than the military.”
“And it ought to,” Mario returned. “Work is the hope of the world, war is its despair.”