“We’ve got to say black or white at last. We’ve got to answer a question this time with a whole answer.”
“This war began so long ago,” he went on, staring at the star. “So long before Sarajevo, so long before the ‘balances of power’ were thought of, so long before the ‘provinces’ were lost and won, before Bismarck and the lot of them were begotten, or their fathers. So many, many years of questions put, and half-answers given in return. Questions, questions: questions of a power-loom in the North Counties; questions of a mill-hand’s lodging in one Manchester or another, of the weight of a headtax in India, of a widow’s mass for her dead in Spain; questions of a black man in the Congo, of an eighth-black man in New Orleans, of a Christian in Turkey, an Irishman in Dublin, a Jew in Moscow, a French cripple in the streets of Zabern; questions of an idiot sitting on a throne; questions of a girl asking her vote on a Hyde Park rostrum, of a girl asking her price in the dark of a Chicago doorway—whole questions half-answered, hungry questions half-fed, mutilated fag-ends of questions piling up and piling up year by year, decade after decade.— Listen! There came a time when it wouldn’t do, wouldn’t do at all. There came a time when the son of all those questions stood up in the world, final, unequivocal, naked, devouring, saying, ‘Now you shall answer me. You shall look me squarely in the face at last, and you shall look at nothing else; you shall take your hands out of your pockets and your tongues out of your cheeks, and no matter how long, no matter what the blood and anguish of it, you shall answer me now with a whole answer—or perish!’”
“And what’s the answer?”
The doctor leaned down a little, resting his hands on the foot of the cot.
The gray patch of Hallett’s face moved slightly in the dark.
“It will sound funny to you. Because it’s a word that’s been worn pretty thin by so much careless handling. It’s ‘Democracy’!”
The doctor stood up straight on his thick legs.
“Why should it sound funny?” he demanded, a vein of triumph in his tone. “It is the answer. And we’ve given it. ‘Make the world safe for democracy!’ Eh? You remember the quotation?”
“Yes, yes, that’s good. But we’ve got to do more than say it, doctor. Go further. We’ve got to dream it in a dream; we’ve got to see democracy as a wild, consuming vision. If the day ever comes when we shall pronounce the word ‘democracy’ with the same fierce faith with which we conceive them to be pronouncing ‘autocracy’—that day, doctor—”
He raised a transparent hand and moved it slowly over his eyes.