He spoke with assurance, but from the corner of his eye he threw me a wistful, fugitive glance, as if to make sure from my bearing that this was really what he meant. I did not contradict him. I was thinking of his wife. For the first time in my experience my sympathies were with the tired business man. It is good for the tired business man that his wife shall be alive to the things that count; but two nights in succession is rather hard. His wife, I knew, was alive to every phase of our intense modern existence, and in rapid succession. She did not precisely burn with that hard, gemlike flame which Mr. Pater recommended. Sometimes I thought she burned with a sixty-four-candle power carbon glow. It was a bit trying on the eyes.
"Or take the question of sex," he said. "What is there in sex emotion to be ashamed of? It is the most primordial of feelings. It comes before the law of gravitation, as the speaker showed last night."
"Does it though?" I said.
"Well," he said, "perhaps it was the night before last. Around this universal urge, of which we ought to be proud, as the most powerful force in Evolution (the speaker last night was sure there could be no doubt on the subject), we have built up an elaborate structure of reticence and hypocrisy. All art, all literature, is of significance only as it emphasises sex. If the Bible has impressed itself on the imagination of humanity for two thousand years, it is because it contains the most beautiful love songs in all literature. It is the force which drives the sun in its course, as the Italian poet has said. It has been the inspiration of all great deeds. If we searched deeply enough, we should find that sex was the inspiration behind the discovery of America, the invention of printing, and the building of the Roman aqueducts. Only the most benighted ignorance will permit our prudish sentiments on the subject to stand in the way of a movement which is sweeping the world like wildfire."
"Referring to eugenics?" I said.
"No," he said, "I mean the tango."
He looked out of the window and pondered.
"Yes," he said, "that was night before last. What the speaker dwelt upon last night was the subject of democracy. At present we know nothing of true democracy, of true equality. Society is divided into classes with separate codes of morals and standards of conduct. There are rich and poor; workers and idlers; meat eaters and vegetarians; the old and the young; the literate, the illiterate, and the advocates of simplified spelling. It isn't a world at all; it is chaos. In the end it all resolves itself into this: humanity is divided into the strong and the weak. The surest way to do away with inequality is to produce a race in which every member is strong."
"You mean—" I said.
"Pardon me," he said. "I haven't finished. Let me sum up the speaker's concluding sentence as I recall it. As we look around us to-day there is unmistakably one force which works for the elimination of that inequality which is the source of all our troubles; a force which wipes out all distinction of class, of age, and of education, and produces a world in which everybody is engaged in doing the same thing as everybody else."