“Good Lord!” roars his uncle very loudly. “I never heard such a subversive and immoral doctrine in all my days!”
Bertram glances pityingly at him.
“And yet it is based on precisely the same theory as the one which you accepted when you passed the Compulsory Clause of the Parish Councils Bill.”
“The Upper House passed that infamous Bill. I was in the minority against it,” replies Southwold, very angrily.
“But when everybody’s got sixpence a day,” suggests a young man with an ingenuous countenance, “and nobody sixpence halfpenny, surely somebody’ll have a try for the illegal halfpenny, won’t they? It is human nature.”
“Certainly not,” replies Bertram, very positively. “Nobody will even wish for an extra halfpenny, because when inequality shall be at an end envy and discontent will be unknown. Besides, if all the property of the world was confiscated or realised and equally distributed, the individual portion would come more nearly to half a crown a head per diem. On half a crown a head per diem any one can live——”
Lord Southwold sighs. “Oysters are three shillings a dozen,” he murmurs.
“Of course, if you expect to continue the indulgence of an epicure’s diseased appetites——” says Bertram, with impatience.
“It’s the oysters that are diseased, not our appetites,” says Southwold, with a second sigh.
“If,” says Bertram, ignoring his uncle’s nonsense—“if I have made anything clear in my recent remarks it must surely be that Property is, in the old copy-book phrase, the root of all evil; the mandrake growing out of the bodies of the dead, the poisonous gas exhaling from the carrion of prejudice, of injustice, and of caste.”