“I disturb you,” said Dyce.

“There’s no denying it,” was the pleasant answer, “but I am quite ready to be disturbed.  You know this, of course?”

He showed Spencer’s “The Man versus the State.”

“Yes,” answered Dyce, “and I think it a mistake from beginning to end.”

“How so?”

Lord Dymchurch was about thirty, slight in build, rather languid in his movements, conventionally dressed but without any gloss or scrupulous finish, and in manners peculiarly gentle.  His countenance, naturally grave, expressed the man of thought rather than of action; its traits, at the same time, preserved a curious youthfulness, enhanced by the fact of his wearing neither moustache nor beard; when he smiled, it was with an almost boyish frankness, irresistible in its appeal to the good will of the beholder.  Yet the corners of his eyes were touched with the crow’s foot, and his hair began to be brindled, tokens which had their confirmation on brow and lip as often as he lost himself in musing.  He had a soft voice, habitually subdued.  His way of talking inclined to the quietly humorous, and was as little self-assertive as man’s talk can be; but he kept his eyes fixed on anyone who conversed with him, and that clear, kindly gaze offered no encouragement to pretentiousness or any other idle characteristic.  Dyce Lashmar, it might have been noticed, betrayed a certain deference before Lord Dymchurch, and was not wholly at his ease; however decidedly he spoke, his accent lacked the imperturbable confidence which usually distinguished it.

“The title itself I take to be meaningless,” was his reply to the other’s question.  “How can there possibly be antagonism between the individual and the aggregate in which he is involved?  What rights or interests can a man possibly have which are apart from the rights and interests of the body politic without which he could not exist?  One might just as well suppose one of the cells which make up an organic body asserting itself against the body as a whole.”

Lord Dymchurch reflected, playing, as he commonly did, with a seal upon his watchguard.

“That’s suggestive,” he said.

Dyce might have gone on to say that the suggestion, with reference to this very book of Herbert Spencer’s, came from a French sociologist he had been reading; but it did not seem to him worth while.

“You look upon the State as an organism,” pursued Lord Dymchurch.  “A mere analogy, I suppose?”

“A scientific fact.  It’s the final stage of evolution.  Just as cells combine to form the physiological unit, so do human beings combine to form the social-political unit the State.  Did it ever occur to you that the science of biology throws entirely new light on sociological questions?  The laws operating are precisely the same in one region as in the other.  A cell in itself is blind motion; an aggregate of cells is a living creature.  A man by himself is only an animal with superior possibilities; men associated produce reason, civilisation, the body politic.  Could reason ever have come to birth in a man alone?”