“If the limits of progress are in infinity as you say, it follows that its aims are not definite,” I said.  “To live without knowing definitely what you are living for!”

“So be it!  But that ‘not knowing’ is not so dull as your ‘knowing.’  I am going up a ladder which is called progress, civilization, culture; I go on and up without knowing definitely where I am going, but really it is worth living for the sake of that delightful ladder; while you know what you are living for, you live for the sake of some people’s not enslaving others, that the artist and the man who rubs his paints may dine equally well.  But you know that’s the petty, bourgeois, kitchen, grey side of life, and surely it is revolting to live for that alone?  If some insects do enslave others, bother them, let them devour each other!  We need not think about them.  You know they will die and decay just the same, however zealously you rescue them from slavery.  We must think of that great millennium which awaits humanity in the remote future.”

Blagovo argued warmly with me, but at the same time one could see he was troubled by some irrelevant idea.

“I suppose your sister is not coming?” he said, looking at his watch.  “She was at our house yesterday, and said she would be seeing you to-day.  You keep saying slavery, slavery . . .” he went on.  “But you know that is a special question, and all such questions are solved by humanity gradually.”

We began talking of doing things gradually.  I said that “the question of doing good or evil every one settles for himself, without waiting till humanity settles it by the way of gradual development.  Moreover, this gradual process has more than one aspect.  Side by side with the gradual development of human ideas the gradual growth of ideas of another order is observed.  Serfdom is no more, but the capitalist system is growing.  And in the very heyday of emancipating ideas, just as in the days of Baty, the majority feeds, clothes, and defends the minority while remaining hungry, inadequately clad, and defenceless.  Such an order of things can be made to fit in finely with any tendencies and currents of thought you like, because the art of enslaving is also gradually being cultivated.  We no longer flog our servants in the stable, but we give to slavery refined forms, at least, we succeed in finding a justification for it in each particular case.  Ideas are ideas with us, but if now, at the end of the nineteenth century, it were possible to lay the burden of the most unpleasant of our physiological functions upon the working class, we should certainly do so, and afterwards, of course, justify ourselves by saying that if the best people, the thinkers and great scientists, were to waste their precious time on these functions, progress might be menaced with great danger.”

But at this point my sister arrived.  Seeing the doctor she was fluttered and troubled, and began saying immediately that it was time for her to go home to her father.