“They have no minds!” he thinks, bitterly. “We sell a bare score of copies a month of the Age to Come, and the Dustcart, with its beastly ribaldry and social scandals, sells sixty-five thousand!”
“Do you mean to say, Wilfrid,” asks his aunt, eating a caviare sandwich, “that anybody would pay taxes if they were not obliged?”
“Do not people, urged by conscience, send arrears, unasked, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer?”
“Well, they do certainly now and then. But they must be very oddly constituted people.”
“Is conscience an eccentricity?”
His aunt does not argue, she only shakes her head.
“I can’t believe anybody would pay taxes if they weren’t obliged.”
“But they do. There are these instances in the papers. If moral feeling in the public were acute and universal, as it ought to be, every public duty would be fulfilled with promptitude and without pressure.”
The old duke nods very expressively.
“Your aunt’s right,” he mumbles. “Conscience-money can only come from cranks!”