Colonel Woodburn cut in.  “You couldn’t do that, Mr. Dryfoos, under your system.  And if you attempted it, with your conspiracy laws, and that kind of thing, it might bring the climax sooner than you expected.  Your commercialized society has built its house on the sands.  It will have to go.  But I should be sorry if it went before its time.”

“You are righdt, sir,” said Lindau.  “It would be a bity.  I hobe it will last till it feelss its rottenness, like Herodt.  Boat, when its hour gomes, when it trope to bieces with the veight off its own gorrubtion—­what then?”

“It’s not to be supposed that a system of things like this can drop to pieces of its own accord, like the old Republic of Venice,” said the colonel.  “But when the last vestige of commercial society is gone, then we can begin to build anew; and we shall build upon the central idea, not of the false liberty you now worship, but of responsibility —­responsibility.  The enlightened, the moneyed, the cultivated class shall be responsible to the central authority—­emperor, duke, president; the name does not matter—­for the national expense and the national defence, and it shall be responsible to the working-classes of all kinds for homes and lands and implements, and the opportunity to labor at all times.

“The working-classes shall be responsible to the leisure class for the support of its dignity in peace, and shall be subject to its command in war.  The rich shall warrant the poor against planless production and the ruin that now follows, against danger from without and famine from within, and the poor—­”

“No, no, no!” shouted Lindau.  “The State shall do that—­the whole beople.  The men who voark shall have and shall eat; and the men that will not voark, they shall sdarfe.  But no man need sdarfe.  He will go to the State, and the State will see that he haf voark, and that he haf foodt.  All the roadts and mills and mines and landts shall be the beople’s and be ron by the beople for the beople.  There shall be no rich and no boor; and there shall not be war any more, for what bower wouldt dare to addack a beople bound togeder in a broderhood like that?”

“Lion and lamb act,” said Fulkerson, not well knowing, after so much champagne, what words he was using.

No one noticed him, and Colonel Woodburn said coldly to Lindau, “You are talking paternalism, sir.”

“And you are dalking feutalism!” retorted the old man.

The colonel did not reply.  A silence ensued, which no one broke till Fulkerson said:  “Well, now, look here.  If either one of these millenniums was brought about, by force of arms, or otherwise, what would become of ‘Every Other Week’?  Who would want March for an editor?  How would Beaton sell his pictures?  Who would print Mr. Kendricks’s little society verses and short stories?  What would become of Conrad and his good works?” Those named grinned in support of Fulkerson’s diversion, but Lindau and the colonel did not speak; Dryfoos looked down at his plate, frowning.