‘That message,’ he said, resuming his place on the couch, ’is a last word on the tragedy, and will, no doubt, produce some modification in the final stage of its history.  And now, Shiel, let us sit together and confer on this matter.  From the manner in which you have expressed yourself, it is evident that there are points which puzzle you—­you do not get a clean coup d’oeil of the whole regiment of facts, and their causes, and their consequences, as they occurred.  Let us see if out of that confusion we cannot produce a coherence, a symmetry.  A great wrong is done, and on the society in which it is done is imposed the task of making it translucent, of seeing it in all its relations, and of punishing it.  But what happens?  The society fails to rise to the occasion; on the whole, it contrives to make the opacity more opaque, does not see the crime in any human sense; is unable to punish it.  Now this, you will admit, whenever it occurs, is a woful failure:  woful I mean, not very in itself, but very in its significance:  and there must be a precise cause for it.  That cause is the lack of something not merely, or specially, in the investigators of the wrong, but in the world at large—­shall we not boldly call it the lack of culture?  Do not, however, misunderstand me:  by the term I mean not so much attainment in general, as mood in particular.  Whether or when such mood may become universal may be to you a matter of doubt.  As for me, I often think that when the era of civilisation begins—­as assuredly it shall some day begin—­when the races of the world cease to be credulous, ovine mobs and become critical, human nations, then will be the ushering in of the ten thousand years of a clairvoyant culture.  But nowhere, and at no time during the very few hundreds of years that man has occupied the earth, has there been one single sign of its presence.  In individuals, yes—­in the Greek Plato, and I think in your English Milton and Bishop Berkeley—­but in humanity, never; and hardly in any individual outside those two nations.  The reason, I fancy, is not so much that man is a hopeless fool, as that Time, so far as he is concerned, has, as we know, only just begun:  it being, of course, conceivable that the creation of a perfect society of men, as the first requisite to a regime of culture, must nick to itself a longer loop of time than the making of, say, a stratum of coal.  A loquacious person—­he is one of your cherished “novel"-writers, by the way, if that be indeed a Novel in which there is nowhere any pretence at novelty—­once assured me that he could never reflect without swelling on the greatness of the age in which he lived, an age the mighty civilisation of which he likened to the Augustan and Periclean.  A certain stony gaze of anthropological interest with which I regarded his frontal bone seemed to strike the poor man dumb, and he took a hurried departure.  Could he have been ignorant that ours is, in general, greater than