The silent indignation of my peers was brought presently home to my recreant soul by the mother’s gentle—“Really, Mr. Julius, you will excuse me if I regret what you have just said.”
“Excuse me, you who are Charity itself, and read my clumsy speech in the light of a declaration made by a Hindu theosophist—Mr. Mohini: “Whence springs the great diversity of conditions, the contemplation of which breeds Socialism? Is it not the direct outgrowth of the passion of acquisitiveness? The more a Western man gets, the more he wants, and while your world holds to this principle you can never be free from the danger and fear of socialism. The Brotherhood of Man which Jesus Christ believed in has become unthinkable to you, with your millionaires at one end of the scale and your tramps at the other.”[163]
“Do I understand you to conclude that Society, being responsible for crime, should permit criminals to go unpunished?”
“By no means, Professor, but if you will excuse another quotation,—‘Give moral restraint to moral maladies, and not impious chastisements. Do not travel in a bloody circle in punishing murder by murder, for so you sanction assassination in one sense and you perpetuate a war of cannibals.’ * * Remember the condemned man who said: ‘In assassinating I risked my head. You gain; I pay; we are quits.’ And in his heart he added: ‘we are equals.’”
“Who said that?” queried the widow.
“Eliphas Levi, at your service.”
“Thanks. I’ve no use for French morals!” Under cover of this dart she retired. What I love most in woman is her way of retreating from the field of defeat with all the honors of war!
“Seems to me,” said Sue, emerging from a monopoly of tea bun, “that things are just perfectly awful anyhow.”
“My Dear! What can you know about it?” remonstrated the mother. Sue silently pointed a sticky and accusing finger towards those philanthropic journals which cheerfully fulfil their mission of household enlightenment] ad nauseam.
“Things are as they always were,” said the Professor smoothing his philosophic beard.