“That’s not remarkable,” she replied. “That’s logical. The dreamer blazes the way—proves the possibilities of his dream—and the practical man follows it up and makes money out of it. To a practical man there is nothing more practical than making money.”
“Did I convert you?” he pursued.
“I was not in need of conversion. I have been a follower of the new faith—an imperfect and limping follower, it is true—ever since you first announced it.”
“I believe you are laughing at me.”
“Certainly not! I have been brought up in an environment where there is no standard higher than the money standard. Not that my father or husband are dishonest; they are rigidly honest according to their ideas of honesty. But to say that a man must give actual service for every dollar he gets or it isn’t his—that is a conception of honesty so far beyond them as to be an absurdity. But I have wanted to ask you how you are going to enforce this new idealism.”
“Idealism is not enforced. We aspire to it; we may not attain to it. Christianity itself is idealism—the idealism of unselfishness. That ideal has never been attained by any considerable number of people, and yet it has drawn all humanity on to somewhat higher levels as surely as the moon draws the tide. Superficial persons in these days are drawing pictures of the failure of Christianity, which has failed in part; but they could find a much more depressing subject by painting a world from which all Christian idealism had been removed.”
“But surely you have some plan for putting your theories to the test—some plan which will force those to whom idealism appeals in vain. We do not trust to a man’s idealism to keep him from stealing; we put him in jail.”
“All that will come in time, but the question for the seeker after truth is not ‘Will it work?’ but ‘Is it true?’ I fancy I can see the practical men of Moses’ time leaning over his shoulder as he inscribed the Ten Commandments and remarking ‘No use of putting that down, Moses; you can never enforce it.’ But Moses put it down and left the enforcement to natural law and the growing intelligence of the generations which have followed him. We are too much disposed to think it possible to evade a law; to violate it, and escape punishment; but if a law is true, punishment follows violation as implacably as the stars follow their courses. And if society has failed to recognize the law that service, and service only, should be able to command service in return, society must suffer the penalty. We have only to look about us to see that society is paying in full for its violations.
“Yes, I have plans, and I think they would work, but the first thing is the ideal—the new moral sense—that value must not be accepted without giving equal value in return. Society, of course, will have to set up the standards of value. That is a matter of detail—a matter for the practical men who come in the wake of the idealist. But of this I am certain—and I hark back to my old theme—that just as society has found a means of preventing the man who is physically superior from taking wealth without giving service in return, so must society find a means to prevent men who are mentally superior from taking wealth without giving service in return. The superior person, mark you, will still have an advantage, in that his superiority will enable him to EARN more; we shall merely stop him taking what he does not earn. That must come. I think it will come soon. It is the next step in the social evolution of the race.”
She had drunk in his argument as one who hangs on every word, and her wrapt face turned toward his seemed to glow and thrill him in return with a sense of their spiritual oneness. She did not need to tell him that Transley never talked to her like this. Transley loved her, if he loved her at all, for the glory she reflected upon him; he was proud of her beauty, of her daring, of her physical charm and self-reliance. The deeper side of her mental life was to Transley a field unexplored; a field of the very existence of which he was probably unaware. Grant looked into her eyes, now close and responsive, and found within their depths something which sent him to his feet.