‘On ne va plus!’ cried the Voice, and the séance fell into sudden confusion. ‘I won’t have it! I won’t have it!’ shrieked the medium coming to, and casting off her crown at the feet of Mr. Trimblerigg. And the words, beginning in a deep German guttural, ended in Irish-American.
And that, if the world really wants to know, is why no real attempt was made to hew or hang Agag, or do anything to him except on paper in diplomatic notes which meant nothing, and at a General Election which meant very little more—only that the Prime Minister and Mr. Trimblerigg were saving their faces and winning temporary, quite temporary, popularity, which eventually did them as little good as it did harm to Agag.
The skinning of the scapegoat was not so expeditiously disposed of. In that case the goat suffered considerably; but the skin was never really worth the pains it took to remove from his dried and broken bones.
When will modern civilization really understand that its predilection for the Old Testament, once a habit, has now become a disease; and that if it is not very careful the world will die of it.
‘Faites vos jeux, Messieurs!’ Play your game! Sometimes you may win, and sometimes you may lose; but a day comes when you win too big a stake for payment to be possible. Then the bank breaks, and where are you?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Circumstances alter Cases
HAD the rescue of the native tribes of Puto-Congo from the squeezing embrace of modern industrialism and its absentee shareholders been a fairy-tale, they would have remained a happy people without a history, and here at least no more would have been heard of them. But this being the real story, things went otherwise.
It is true that Native Industries Limited not only became itself a reformed character, but managed, by its control of the river routes and depots, to impose repentance on the great Puto-Congo Combine also. There, too, a rout was made of the old Board of Directors, and the missionary zeal of Free Evangelicalism, with an admixture of True Belief, held the balance of power. In the first year shares went down at a run from a thirty to a ten per cent dividend, and the mortality of indentured labour was reduced in about the same proportion.
Of course the shareholders grumbled—not at the reduced death-rate in itself, but at the awkward parallel which its proportional fall suggested between toll of life and that other toll of a more marketable kind which mainly concerned them. It was not pleasant to feel that a reduced ten per cent profit was always going to be the condition of a reduced ten per cent death-rate: that fifteen per cent of the one would cause fifteen per cent of the other, and that, by implication, a life-saving of five per cent might be effected if the chastened shareholders would stay languidly content with a five per cent profit. Mr. Trimblerigg himself felt this to be a reflection upon the reformation he had effected. He had practically promised the shareholders that decent treatment of the natives would eventually bring larger profits. He was annoyed that it had not done so, and was already taking steps to secure more co-ordination and efficiency in the combined companies when the war supervened and gave to the relations of the brother races, white and black, a different complexion.
To put it quite plainly, under war-conditions so far-reaching as to affect the whole world, humanitarian principles had to take second place. For the white race, or tribe, or group of tribes in which Mr. Trimblerigg found himself embraced by birth and moral training was now saving the world not only for private enterprise and democracy, but for the black and the brown and the yellow races as well, all round the globe and back again from San Francisco to Valparaiso. And so the enlistment of the black races in the cause of freedom—even with a little compulsion—became an absolute necessity, a spiritual as well as a military one, and unfortunately the blacks—and more especially the blacks of Puto-Congo—did not see it in that light of an evangelizing civilization as the whites did. They did not know what freedom really was: how could they, having no politics? Their idea of freedom was to run about naked, to live rent-free in huts of their own building on land that belonged to nobody, to put in two hours’ work a week instead of ten hours a day, and when an enemy was so craven as to let himself be captured alive to plant him head-downwards in the earth from which he ought never to have come. That was their view of freedom, and I could name sections of civilized communities holding very similar views though with a difference.