Conan: It was not for that the spell was
promised, to be changing a few neighbours or a
thing of the kind, or to be doing wonders in this
broken little place. A town of dead factions! To
change any of the dwellers in this place would be
to make it better, for it would be impossible to
make it worse. The time you wouldn't be meddling
with them you wouldn't know them to be
bad, but the time you'd have to do business with
them that's the time you'd know it!
Rock: I suppose it is what you are asking to
do, to make yourself rich?
Conan: I do not! I would be loth take any
profit, and Aristotle after laying down that to
pleasure or to profit every wealthy man is a slave!
Flannery: What would you do, so?
Conan: I will change all into the similitude of
ancient Greece! There is no man at all can understand
argument but it is from Greece he is. I know
well what I'm doing. I'm not like a potato having
eyes this way and that. People were harmless
long ago and why wouldn't they be made harmless
again? Aristotle said, "Fair play is more
beautiful than the morning and the evening star!"
"Be friendly with one another," he said, "and
let the lawyers starve!" I'll turn the captains of
soldiers to be as peaceable as children picking
strawberries in the grass. I've a mind to change
the tongue of the people to the language of the
Greeks, that no farmer will be grumbling over a
halfpenny Independent, but be following the plough
in full content, giving out Homer and the praises
of the ancient world!
Flannery: If you make the farmers content you
will make the world content.
Rock: You will, when you'll bring the sun from
Greece to ripen our little lock of oats!
Conan: So I will drag Ireland from its moorings
till I'll bring it to the middling sea that has no ebb
or flood!
Rock: You will do well to put a change on the
college that harboured you, and that left you so
much of folly.