Page:The One Woman (1903).pdf/273

 the grimmest joke Fate ever played on the pride of man. Within the generation now living a Coöperative Commonwealth will supplant the whole system of slave wages."

The banker suddenly straightened his massive neck and his eye flashed.

"You mean establish a system of universal slavery. Suppose under your maudlin cry of brotherhood you set up your fool's paradise, where would reside the authority of your Commonwealth?"

"In the State, of course."

"And who would be the State? You talk about the State as though it were some mysterious Ark of the Covenant of God, let down out of heaven and enshrined in capitals of marble. The State is simply made out of common dirt called Tom, Dick and Harry, whom a lot of other plain Toms, Dicks and Harrys set up in power. Will not your pig-pen you call the Coöperative Commonwealth have men in charge with authority to call the pigs to dinner and drive them to the fields to root?"

"Certainly, there must be authority," Gordon snapped.

Overman mused a moment.

"Yet your patron saint, William Morris, proclaims a heaven here below without law, where man kills his fellow man and answers only to his own conscience; where we will tear up the railroads and walk, blow up our steamships and use rowboats, in our harvest fields the whetstone on the old