They were not as yet very large or well-formed crystals.  The proposition he struggled to develop was this, that True Democracy did not mean an equal share in the government, it meant an equal opportunity to share in the government.  Men were by nature and in the most various ways unequal.  True Democracy aimed only at the removal of artificial inequalities. . . .

It was on the truth of this statement, that men were by nature unequal, that the debate had turned.  Prothero was passionately against the idea at that time.  It was, he felt, separating himself from Benham more and more.  He spoke with a personal bitterness.  And he found his chief ally in a rigorous and voluble Frenchman named Carnac, an aggressive Roman Catholic, who opened his speech by saying that the first aristocrat was the devil, and shocked Prothero by claiming him as probably the only other sound Christian in the room.  Several biologists were present, and one tall, fair youth with a wearisome forefinger tried to pin Carnac with questions.

“But you must admit some men are taller than others?”

“Then the others are broader.”

“Some are smaller altogether.”

“Nimbler—­it’s notorious.”

“Some of the smaller are less nimble than the others.”

“Then they have better nightmares.  How can you tell?”

The biologist was temporarily incapacitated, and the talk went on over his prostrate attempts to rally and protest.

A second biologist seemed to Benham to come nearer the gist of the dispute when he said that they were not discussing the importance of men, but their relative inequalities.  Nobody was denying the equal importance of everybody.  But there was a virtue of this man and a virtue of that.  Nobody could dispute the equal importance of every wheel in a machine, of every atom in the universe.  Prothero and Carnac were angry because they thought the denial of absolute equality was a denial of equal importance.  That was not so.  Every man mattered in his place.  But politically, or economically, or intellectually that might be a lowly place. . . .

At this point Carnac interrupted with a whooping and great violence, and a volley of obscure French colloquialisms.

He was understood to convey that the speaker was a Jew, and did not in the least mean what he was saying. . . .

15

The second paper was an altogether maturer and more characteristic production.  It was no longer necessary to answer Prothero.  Prothero had been incorporated.  And Benham had fairly got away with his great idea.  It was evident to White that this paper had been worked over on several occasions since its first composition and that Benham had intended to make it a part of his book.  There were corrections in pencil and corrections in a different shade of ink, and there was an unfinished new peroration, that was clearly the latest addition of all.  Yet its substance had been there always.  It gave the youth just grown to manhood, but anyhow fully grown.  It presented the far-dreaming intellectualist shaped.