The other laughed. “Ask your eminent brother-in-law! He’ll know.”
“But he wouldn’t tell me. We barely speak.”
Paul answered that armaments produce wars automatically; the capitalists who make the armaments have to see that they are used, in order to get to make more. Bunny said that the idea of another war seemed too horrible to think about; and Paul replied, “So you don’t think about it, and that makes it easy for the business men to get it ready.”
He sat for a bit in thought, and then went on, “Since I’ve been travelling in Europe, I find myself remembering that night when you and I met for the first time. Do you recollect it, son?”
When Bunny said that he did, Paul went on, “I wasn’t in my aunt’s living-room, and I didn’t see those people that had come to lease their lots; but I listened outside and heard the wrangling; and now, as I go about Europe I say to myself, that is world diplomacy. A wrangle over an oil lease! Every nation hating every other one, making combinations and promising to stick together—but they’ve sold each other out before night, and there’s no lie that any one hasn’t told, and no crime they haven’t committed. You remember that row?”
How well Bunny remembered! Miss Snypp—he hadn’t known her name, but her face rose before him, brick-red with wrath. “Let me tell you, you’ll never get me to put my signature on that paper—never in this world!” And Mr. Hank, the man with the hatchet-face, shouting, “Let me tell you, the law will make you sign it”—only there was no law in European diplomacy! And Mrs. Groarty, Paul’s aunt, glaring at Mr. Hank and clenching her hands as if she had him by the throat. “And you the feller that was yellin’ for the rights of the little lots! You was for sharin’ and sharin’ alike—you snake in the grass!”
Said Paul: “Those people were so blind with greed, they were willing to throw away their own chances for the satisfaction of beating the others. They did that, I think you told me—threw away the lease with your father. And everybody in the field behaved the same way. I wonder if you happen to know, it’s government statistics on that Prospect Hill field—more money was spent in drilling than ever was taken out in oil!”
“Yes, of course,” said Bunny. “I’ve seen derricks there with platforms actually touching.”
“Each one racing to get the oil, and spending more than he makes—isn’t that a picture of capitalism? And then the war! You remember how we heard the racket, and ran to the window, and there was one fellow hitting the next fellow in the nose, and the whole roomful milling about, shouting and trying to stop the fight, or to get into it!”
“One said, ‘You dirty, lying yellow skunk!’ And the other said, ‘Take that, you white-livered puppy!’ ”