“What’s wrong with the paper, Mr. Verriman?” said Ben, pleasantly.

Eddie did not love the adventure of mental combat, but he was no coward.  “It seems to me,” he said, “that it preaches such radical changes in our government that it is seditious.  To be frank, Mr. Moreton, I think the government ought to suppress it.”

“But we don’t break the law.  The government can’t suppress us.”

“Then the laws ought to be changed so that it can.”

“That’s all we advocate, Mr. Verriman, the changing of the law.  It isn’t any more seditious for me to say it than for you to, is it?”

Of course in Eddie’s opinion it was—­much, much more seditious.  Only somehow it was a difficult point to make clear, if a person was so wrongheaded he couldn’t see it for himself.  The point was that he, Eddie, was right in wanting the laws changed and Moreton was wrong.  Anyone, it seemed to Eddie, would agree to that, unless he happened to agree with Moreton beforehand, and those were just the people who ought to be deported, imprisoned, or even perhaps in rare instances, as examples, strung up to lamp-posts.  Only each time he tried to put these very natural opinions in words, they kept sounding wrong and tyrannical and narrow—­qualities which Eddie knew he was entirely without.  In order to counteract this effect, he tried at first to speak very temperately and calmly, but, unhappily, this only had the effect of making him sound patronizing to Ben’s ears.

In short, it was hardly to be expected that the discussion would be amicable, and it was not.  Each man began to be angry in his own way.  Eddie shouted a little, and Ben expressed himself with turns of phrase quite needlessly insulting.  Ben found Verriman’s assumption that the profits of capital were bound up with patriotism, family life, and the Christian religion almost as irritating as Verriman found Ben’s assumption that the government of labor as a class would be entirely without the faults that have always marked every form of class government.

“And suppose you got socialism,” said Eddie, at last, “suppose you did divide everything up equally, don’t you suppose that in a few years the clever, strong, industrious men would have it all in their own hands?”

“Very likely,” said Ben, “but that would be quite a change from the present arrangement, wouldn’t it?”

Mr. Cord had a narrow escape from laughing out loud, which would have cost him the friendship of the man with whom on the whole he really agreed.  He thought it was time to interfere.

“This is very interesting, Mr. Moreton,” he said, “but I fancy it wasn’t about the general radical propaganda that you came to see me.”

“No,” said Ben, turning slowly.  He felt as a dog feels who is dragged out of the fight just as it begins to get exciting.  “No, I came to see you about this unfortunate engagement of my brother’s.”

“Unfortunate?” asked Mr. Cord, without criticism.