Stealing glances about me, I saw that several people were watching the forty-or-fifty-times-over millionaire; they had evidently recognised him, and were enjoying the joke.  “Haven’t you had enough of this?” he suddenly demanded of his wife, and she answered, guilelessly:  “No, let’s wait.  I’m interested.”

“Now, listen to me, Mr. American Millionaire,” the speaker was continuing.  “You are the one who plays tennis, and we, who chase the balls for you—­we are the lunatics.  And my purpose to-day is to prove to you that it is only because you play tennis all day that we have to chase balls all the day, and to tell you that some time soon we are going to cease to be lunatics, and that then you will have to chase your own balls!  And don’t, in your amusement over this illustration, lose sight of the serious nature of what I am talking about—­the horrible economic lunacy which is known as poverty, and which is responsible for most of the evils we have in this world to-day—­for crime and prostitution, suicide, insanity and war.  My purpose is to show you, not by any guess of mine, or any appeals to your faith, but by cold business facts which can be understood in Wall Street, that this economic lunacy is one which can be cured; that we have the remedy in our hands, and lack nothing but the intelligence to apply it.”

18.  I do not want to bore you with a Socialist speech.  I only want to give you an idea of the trap into which Mr. Douglas van Tuiver had been drawn.  He stood there, rigidly aloof while the speaker went on to explain the basic facts of wealth-production in modern society.  She quoted from Kropotkin:  “’Fields, Factories and Work-shops,’ on sale at this meeting for a quarter!”—­showing how by modern intensive farming—­no matter of theory, but methods which were in commercial use in hundreds of places—­it would be possible to feed the entire population of the globe from the soil of the British Isles alone.  She showed by the bulletins of the United States Government how the machine process had increased the productive power of the individual labourer ten, twenty, a hundred fold.  So vast was man’s power of producing wealth today, and yet the labourer lived in dire want just as in the days of crude hand-industry!

So she came back to her millionaire, upon whom this evil rested.  He was the master of the machine for whose profit the labourer had to produce.  He could only employ the labourer to produce what could be sold at a profit; and so the stream of prosperity was choked at its source.  “It is you, Mr. Millionaire, who are to blame for poverty; it is because so many millions of dollars must be paid to you in profits that so many millions of men must live in want.  In other words, precisely as I declared at the outset, it is your playing tennis which is responsible for the lunatics chasing the balls!”