“One at a time!” he roared at them.

The sound arose from his great lungs and dominated the human tempest.  By sheer compulsion of personality he commanded silence.

“One at a time,” he repeated softly.  “Let me answer Colonel Van Gilbert.  After that the rest of you can come at me—­but one at a time, remember.  No mass-plays here.  This is not a football field.

“As for you,” he went on, turning toward Colonel Van Gilbert, “you have replied to nothing I have said.  You have merely made a few excited and dogmatic assertions about my mental caliber.  That may serve you in your business, but you can’t talk to me like that.  I am not a workingman, cap in hand, asking you to increase my wages or to protect me from the machine at which I work.  You cannot be dogmatic with truth when you deal with me.  Save that for dealing with your wage-slaves.  They will not dare reply to you because you hold their bread and butter, their lives, in your hands.

“As for this return to nature that you say you learned at college before I was born, permit me to point out that on the face of it you cannot have learned anything since.  Socialism has no more to do with the state of nature than has differential calculus with a Bible class.  I have called your class stupid when outside the realm of business.  You, sir, have brilliantly exemplified my statement.”

This terrible castigation of her hundred-thousand-dollar lawyer was too much for Miss Brentwood’s nerves.  Her hysteria became violent, and she was helped, weeping and laughing, out of the room.  It was just as well, for there was worse to follow.

“Don’t take my word for it,” Ernest continued, when the interruption had been led away.  “Your own authorities with one unanimous voice will prove you stupid.  Your own hired purveyors of knowledge will tell you that you are wrong.  Go to your meekest little assistant instructor of sociology and ask him what is the difference between Rousseau’s theory of the return to nature and the theory of socialism; ask your greatest orthodox bourgeois political economists and sociologists; question through the pages of every text-book written on the subject and stored on the shelves of your subsidized libraries; and from one and all the answer will be that there is nothing congruous between the return to nature and socialism.  On the other hand, the unanimous affirmative answer will be that the return to nature and socialism are diametrically opposed to each other.  As I say, don’t take my word for it.  The record of your stupidity is there in the books, your own books that you never read.  And so far as your stupidity is concerned, you are but the exemplar of your class.

“You know law and business, Colonel Van Gilbert.  You know how to serve corporations and increase dividends by twisting the law.  Very good.  Stick to it.  You are quite a figure.  You are a very good lawyer, but you are a poor historian, you know nothing of sociology, and your biology is contemporaneous with Pliny.”