“How would you deal with the children?”
“In communities here, at the heart of the trouble, and also in the West, where they could be easily made self-supporting.”
“I don’t believe in communities,” said Hughes. “If anything in the world has thoroughly failed, it is communities. They have failed all the more lamentably when they have succeeded financially, because that sort of success comes from competition with the world outside. A community is an aggrandized individual; it is the extension, of the egoistic motive to a large family, which looks out for its own good against other families, just as a small family does. I have had enough of communities. The family we hope to found must include all men who are willing to work; it must recognize no aliens except the drones, and the drones must not be suffered to continue. They must either cease to exist by going to work, or by starving to death. But this great family—the real human family—must be no agglutinated structure, no mere federation of trades-unions; it must be a natural growth from indigenous stocks, which will gradually displace individual and corporate enterprises by pushing its roots and its branches out wider and over them, till they have no longer earth or air to live in. It will then slowly possess itself of the whole field of production and distribution.”
“Very slowly,” said the young Englishman; and he laughed.
The debate went on, and it seemed as if there were almost as many opinions as there were people present. At times it interested Ray, at times it bored him; but at all times he kept thinking that if he could get those queer zealots into a book, they would be amusing material, though he shuddered to find himself personally among them. Hughes coughed painfully in the air thickened with many breaths, and the windows had to be opened for him; then the rush of the elevated trains filled the room, and the windows were shut again. After one of these interludes, Ray was aware of Hughes appealing to some one in the same tone in which he had asked him to go and send in his whiskey and milk; he looked up, and saw that Hughes was appealing to him.
“Young man, have you nothing to say on all these questions? Is it possible that you have not thought of them?”
Ray was so startled that for a moment he could not speak. Then he said, hardily, but in the frank spirit of the discussion, “No, I have never thought of them at all.”
“It is time you did,” said Hughes. “All other interests must yield to them. We can have no true art, no real literature, no science worthy the name, till the money-stamp of egoism is effaced from success, and it is honored, not paid.”
The others turned and stared at Ray; old Kane arched his eyebrows at him, and made rings of white round his eyes; he pursed his mouth as if he would like to laugh. Ray saw Mrs. Denton put her hand on her mouth; her husband glowered silently; her sister sat with downcast eyes.
Hughes went on: “I find it easier to forgive enmity than indifference; he who is not for us is against us in the worst sense. Our cause has a sacred claim upon all generous and enlightened spirits; they are recreant if they neglect it. But we must be patient, even with indifference; it is hard to bear, but we cannot fight it, and we must bear it. Nothing has astonished me more, since my return to the world, than to find the great mass of men living on, as when I left it, in besotted indifference to the vital interests of the hour. I find the politicians still talking of the tariff, just as they used to talk; low tariff and cheap clothes for the working-man; high tariff and large wages for the working-man. Whether we have high tariff or low, the working-man always wins. But he does not seem to prosper. He is poor; he is badly fed and housed; when he is out of work he starves in his den till he is evicted with a ruthlessness unknown in the history of Irish oppression. Neither party means to do anything for the working-man, and he hasn’t risen himself yet to the conception of anything more philosophical than more pay and fewer hours.”