“I assure you,” said Frederick, with a tolerable attempt at dry irony, “I don’t know what I have done to deserve this distinction, or what I shall do to deserve it in the future.”

Then they spoke of other things.

The clear weather and the prospect of a peaceful night filled the festive diners with undimmed gaiety.  They ate, they drank, they laughed, they flirted, all in the delightful consciousness that they were citizens of the departing nineteenth century, with the probability of being citizens of the even grander twentieth century.

XXIX

After dinner the two physicians went to Doctor Wilhelm’s cabin, where they sat together discussing the resultant of modern civilisation.

“I very much fear, very much, indeed,” said Frederick, “that our world-wide means of communication, which mankind is supposed to own, really own mankind.  At least so far, I see no signs that the tremendous working capacity of machines has lessened human labour.  Nobody will deny that our modern machine slavery, on so tremendous a scale, is the most imposing slavery that has ever existed.  And there is no denying that it is slavery.  Has this age of machinery subtracted from the sum of human misery?  No, most emphatically, no!  Has it enhanced happiness and increased the chances for happiness?  No, again.”

“That is why every three or four men of culture,” said Doctor Wilhelm, “are disciples of Schopenhauer.  Modern Buddhism is making rapid strides.”

“Yes,” said Frederick, “because we are living in a world all the time making a tremendous impression upon itself.  As a result, it is getting to be more and more fearfully bored.  The man of the intellectual middle class is gaining in prominence, while he is more mediocre than he has been in any previous age.  At the same time he is glutted and more blase.  No form of idealism, no sort of genuinely great belief can hold its ground any longer.”

“I admit,” said Wilhelm, “that the great industrial corporation, civilisation, is parsimonious of everything except human lives and the best that is in the human being.  It places no value upon them.  It lets them rot.  But I think there is one comfort.  I think civilisation possesses this one good, that it breaks us away once for all with the worst savageries of the past.  No inquisition, for instance, can ever be possible again.”

“Are you sure of it?” asked Frederick.  “Don’t you think it is strange that alongside the greatest achievements of science, alongside Galileo, Kepler, Laplace; alongside the spectrum analysis and the law of the conservation of energy; alongside Kirchoff and Bunsen; alongside steam, gas, electricity, the blindest and most antiquated superstitions still survive, powerful as ever?  I am not so certain that backsliding into the most horrible times of the Malleus maleficarum is impossible.”

Doctor Wilhelm had rung for a steward, who now entered.  Max Pander appeared at the same time.