Clifford made big eyes: it was all stuff to him. Connie secretly
laughed to herself.
`Well then we're all plucked apples,' said Hammond, rather acidly and
petulantly.
`So let's make cider of ourselves,' said Charlie.
`But what do you think of Bolshevism?' put in the brown Berry, as if
everything had led up to it.
`Bravo!' roared Charlie. `What do you think of Bolshevism?'
`Come on! Let's make hay of Bolshevism!' said Dukes.
`I'm afraid Bolshevism is a large question,' said Hammond, shaking his
head seriously.
`Bolshevism, it seems to me,' said Charlie, `is just a superlative
hatred of the thing they call the bourgeois; and what the bourgeois is,
isn't quite defined. It is Capitalism, among other things. Feelings and
emotions are also so decidedly bourgeois that you have to invent a man
without them.
`Then the individual, especially the personal man, is bourgeois: so he
must be suppressed. You must submerge yourselves in the greater thing, the
Soviet-social thing. Even an organism is bourgeois: so the ideal must be
mechanical. The only thing that is a unit, non-organic, composed of many
different, yet equally essential parts, is the machine. Each man a
machine-part, and the driving power of the machine, hate...hate of the
bourgeois. That, to me, is Bolshevism.'
`Absolutely!' said Tommy. `But also, it seems to me a perfect
description of the whole of the industrial ideal. It's the factory-owner's
ideal in a nut-shell; except that he would deny that the driving power was
hate. Hate it is, all the same; hate of life itself. Just look at these
Midlands, if it isn't plainly written up...but it's all part of the life of
the mind, it's a logical development.'
`I deny that Bolshevism is logical, it rejects the major part of the
premisses,' said Hammond.
`My dear man, it allows the material premiss; so does the pure
mind...exclusively.'
`At least Bolshevism has got down to rock bottom,' said Charlie.
`Rock bottom! The bottom that has no bottom! The Bolshevists will have
the finest army in the world in a very short time, with the finest
mechanical equipment.
`But this thing can't go on...this hate business. There must be a
reaction...' said Hammond.
`Well, we've been waiting for years...we wait longer. Hate's a growing
thing like anything else. It's the inevitable outcome of forcing ideas on to
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