“I’d sooner live in old Pompeii than in new Turin,” Barbara murmured.
“If Pompeii had been paradise in 1914, it would be an outworn paradise now!” O’Rane, I thought, looked tired and old, as though perpetual opposition was gradually wearing him down. “The world changes in seven years, especially if the inhabitants have spent four of them withstanding a stream of molten lava. Can you tell me a single idea we’ve put forward, a single effort we’ve made to improve on 1914 so that Pompeii shall not be buried again?”
I left Barbara to wrestle with his question while I glanced at the manuscript article. O’Rane’s own contribution to the ideas of the new age seemed to be that the hand of every man must be against his neighbour so long as unequal wealth made the one arrogant and the other envious. As human capacities were unequal, wealth must continue to be unequally amassed for a single lifetime; but to perpetuate this inequality was to perpetuate the friction that ultimately lead to revolution and civil war.
“You’re at least consistent,” I said. “On the night Stornaway died, you told me there was no room in the modern state for these gigantic fortunes.”
“I doubt if we have room for private transmitted wealth of any kind,” he answered. “It debilitates the individual, it demoralizes society. I’m seeing that every day in my own work.”
The subject was too big to discuss at midnight; but, as his article was avowedly the preamble to a declaration that he was bent at all costs on saving humanity from the poison of the Lancing inheritance, I warned him that the unemployed might break his windows if they heard that a million a year was going to feed distant Russians when they themselves had not eaten a square meal for twelve months. I asked whether his wife approved of the article, but received no answer. Finally, I returned him his manuscript with a reminder that I could not stultify my weekly predictions of insolvency by proclaiming of a sudden that we were all suffering from too much money.
“I’ll try elsewhere,” said O’Rane without resentment. “I’m sorry, but I’m not surprised. You’re hypnotized by 1914, too, and you think you can avert another eruption by treaties and boards of arbitration. They didn’t stop the war in ’14, George; they never have stopped wars, they never will. If you’d change the course of history, you must change the heart of man.”
“The more I study the heart of man . . .” I was beginning.
“It changes daily,” O’Rane cried. “It changed when man turned sick at gladiatorial shows and slavery and torture. It will change again when men find that cooperation is more comfortable than competition. But you’ll have competition always—the competition of the rich with the poor, among individuals and nations, the inevitable forerunner to every revolution and war—so long as you crystallize an unequal distribution of wealth.”
“Write me an article on that theme,” I said, “and I’ll publish it gladly.”