Martineau's philosophy, of being Man and Woman on their Planet considering its Future, but insensibly they developed the idiosyncrasies of their position.They might profess to be Man and Woman in the most general terms, but the facts that she was the daughter not of Everyman but old Grammont and that Sir Richmond was the angry leader of a minority upon the Fuel Commission became more and more important."What shall we do with this planet of ours? " gave way by the easiest transitions to "What are you and I doing and what have we got to do? How do you feel about it all? What do you desire and what do you dare?"It was natural that Sir Richmond should talk of his Fuel Commission to a young woman whose interests in fuel were even greater than his own.He found that she was very much better read than he was in the recent literature of socialism, and that she had what he considered to be a most unfeminine grasp of economic ideas.He thought her attitude towards socialism a very sane one because it was also his own.So far as socialism involved the idea of a scientific control of natural resources as a common property administered in the common interest, she and he were very greatly attracted by it; but so far as it served as a form of expression for the merely insubordinate discontent of the many with the few, under any conditions, so long as it was a formula for class jealousy and warfare, they were both repelled by it.If she had had any illusions about the working class possessing as a class any profounder political wisdom or more generous public impulses than any other class, those illusions had long since departed.People were much the same, she thought, in every class; there was no stratification of either rightness or righteousness.
He found he could talk to her of his work and aims upon the Fuel Commission and of the conflict and failure of motives he found in himself, as freely as he had done to Dr.Martineau and with a surer confidence of understanding.Perhaps his talks with the doctor had got his ideas into order and made them more readily expressible than they would have been otherwise.He argued against the belief that any class could be good as a class or bad as a class, and he instanced the conflict of motives he found in all the members of his Committee and most so in himself.He repeated the persuasion he had already confessed to Dr.Martineau that there was not a single member of the Fuel Commission but had a considerable drive towards doing the right thing about fuel, and not one who had a single-minded, unencumbered drive towards the right thing."That," said Sir Richmond, "is what makes life so interesting and, in spite of a thousand tragic disappointments, so hopeful.Every man is a bad man, every man is a feeble man and every man is a good man.My motives come and go.Yours do the same.We vary in response to the circumstances about us.Given a proper atmosphere, most men will be public-spirited, right-living, generous.Given perplexities and darkness, most of us can be cowardly and vile.People say you cannot change human nature and perhaps that is true, but you can change its responses endlessly.The other day I was in Bohemia, discussing Silesian coal with Benes, and I went to see the Festival of the Bohemian Sokols.
Opposite to where I sat, far away across the arena, was a great bank of men of the Sokol organizations, an unbroken brown mass wrapped in their brown uniform cloaks.Suddenly the sun came out and at a word the whole body flung back their cloaks, showed their Garibaldi shirts and became one solid blaze of red.It was an amazing transformation until one understood what had happened.Yet nothing material had changed but the sunshine.And given a change in laws and prevailing ideas, and the very same people who are greedy traders, grasping owners and revolting workers to-day will all throw their cloaks aside and you will find them working together cheerfully, even generously, for a common end.They aren't traders and owners and workers and so forth by any inner necessity.Those are just the ugly parts they play in the present drama.Which is nearly at the end of its run.""That's a hopeful view," said Miss Grammont."I don't see the flaw in it--if there is a flaw.""There isn't one, " said Sir Richmond."It is my chief discovery about life.I began with the question of fuel and the energy it affords mankind, and I have found that my generalization applies to all human affairs.Human beings are fools, weaklings, cowards, passionate idiots,--I grant you.
That is the brown cloak side of them, so to speak.But they are not such fools and so forth that they can't do pretty well materially if once we hammer out a sane collective method of getting and using fuel.Which people generally will understand--in the place of our present methods of snatch and wrangle.Of that I am absolutely convinced.Some work, some help, some willingness you can get out of everybody.That's the red.And the same principle applies to most labour and property problems, to health, to education, to population, social relationships and war and peace.We haven't got the right system, we have inefficient half-baked systems, or no system at all, and a wild confusion and war of ideas in all these respects.But there is a right system possible none the less.Let us only hammer our way through to the sane and reasonable organization in this and that and the other human affairs, and once we have got it, we shall have got it for good.We may not live to see even the beginnings of success, but the spirit of order, the spirit that has already produced organized science, if only there are a few faithful, persistent people to stick to the job, will in the long run certainly save mankind and make human life clean and splendid, happy work in a clear mind.If I could live to see it!""And as for us--in our time?"
