"But, granting for the sake of argument that he may not always get his money honestly, doesn't he give a fair share of all he gathers to the poor?" Applebaum asked.
"To the producers, you mean, the men who made his wealth? Not such a noble portion as you might think. I was in India once, during a famine. Children lay dead by the wayside, their thin little arms stiff at their sides. At night when you went by a native hut you heard a baby sobbing as it pulled at an empty breast, or you listened to that saddest cry in the world, a mother wailing for her dead child."
"Bad crops?" Billy questioned.
"Thievery!" the Major answered in a tone that made Madame jump at her distant table, while the three immediate listeners felt as though a bomb had exploded. Then in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice, as though narrating a commonplace: "Down at the coast I saw ships laden with grain for England, loaded by those people who you feel give a fair share of what they gather to the poor."
"That's like the English!" Kathleen cried, her Irish blood asserting itself. "They're the oppressors of the world!"
"Nonsense," the Major retorted, "you don't know what you're talking about. When the English conquered India the natives exchanged one master for another, that was all. If the native princes and rajahs stole less than the British, and I don't know that this was the case, it was stupidity not kindliness that kept them from making a complete job."
"I don't believe they were such hypocrites as the English," Kathleen muttered.
She felt much aggrieved. Customarily she held the floor and her listeners either contented themselves with silent dissent or uttered short, ineffectual protests. To-night a friend, a revolutionist like herself, characterized her ideas as foolish and nonsensical, while the audience she was accustomed to routing looked on delighted at her discomfiture. She was mistaken in her interpretation of Applebaum's feeling. He was grieved that any one should show her rudeness; but Hertha, it is to be confessed, was pleased at the turn events were taking. She looked at the Major for another broadside, but to her surprise, he nodded acquiescence to Kathleen's last remark.
"You're right about that," he said, "though hypocrisy isn't English, it belongs to civilization. When you do wrong and know it, but desire to go on in wrong-doing, if you are a savage you continue without apology. If you are civilized you begin the process, the slow, evolutionary process," nodding his head at Applebaum, "of deceiving yourself. It's a process that takes longer with some than with others, but after a while wrong becomes right in your mind and you can do evil from the highest motives. And after you deceive yourself you deceive others, using good people for your tools. The devil always chooses the best people to do his work."
"And isn't it because of this," Kathleen rushed in, believing that she would secure recognition at last, "that we're fighting in the unions and in the Party [there was but one political party to Kathleen] to down the oppressor and to take possession of the earth?"