“Not a bit,” said Olivia.
She learned many astonishing things that afternoon, as she was swayed about from introduction to introduction among the eagerly disputing groups. Hitherto she had thought, with little comprehension, of the world-spread social unrest. Strikes angered her because they interfered with necessary reconstruction and only set the working classes in a vicious circle chasing high wages and being chased in their turn by high prices. At other demands she shuddered, dimly dreading the advent of Bolshevism. And there she left it. She had imagined that revolutionary doctrines were preached to factory hands either secretly by rat-faced agents, or by brass-throated, bull-necked demagogues. That they should be accepted as a common faith by a crowd of people much resembling a fairly well-to-do suburban church congregation stirred her surprise and even dismay.
“I don’t see how intelligent folk can hold such views,” she said to Roger Blenkiron, who had been defending the Russian Soviet system as a philosophic experiment in government.
He smiled indulgently. “Doesn’t the fault lie rather in you, dear lady, than in the intelligent folk?”
“Would that argument stand,” she replied, “if you had been maintaining that the earth was flat and stood still in space?”
“No. The roundness and motion of the earth are ascertained physical facts. But—I speak with the greatest deference—can you assert it to be a scientific fact that a community of human beings are a priori incapable of managing their own affairs on a basis of social equality?”
“Of course I can,” Olivia declared, to the gentle amusement of standers-by. “Human nature won’t allow it. With inequalities of brain and character social equality is impossible.”
“Dear Lady”—she hated the apostrophe as he said it and the lift of the eyebrows which caused an upward ripple that was lost in the far reaches of his bald forehead. “Dear Lady,” said he, “in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot you can find every grade of human intellect, from the inbred young aristocrat who is that much removed”—he flicked a finger nail—“from a congenital idiot to the acute-brained statesman; every grade of human character from the lowest of moral defectives to the highest that the present civilization can produce. And yet they are all on a social equality. And why? They started life on a common plane. The same phenomenon exists in a mass-meeting of working-men—in any assemblage of human beings of a particular class who have started life on a common plane. Now, don’t you see, that if we abolished all these series of planes and established only one plane, social equality would be inevitable?”
“I don’t see how you’re going to do it.”
“Ah! That’s another question. Think of what the task is. To make a clean sweep of false principles to which mankind has subscribed for—what do I know—say—eight thousand years. It can’t be done in a day. Not even in a generation. If you wish to render a pestilence-stricken area habitable, you must destroy and burn for miles around before you can rebuild. Extend the area to a country—to the surface of the civilized globe. That’s the philosophic theory of what is vulgarly called Bolshevism. Let us lay waste the whole plague-stricken fabric of our civilization, so that the world may arise, a new Phœnix, under our children’s hands.”