"  It  is  a  modern,  scientific  system  with  monarchy  as  its


A  FAR  COUNTRY  363

superstructure.  It  is  anomalous,  but  frauk.  The  mon-
archy is  there  for  all  men  to  see,  and  some  day  it  will  be  done
away  with.  We  are  supposedly  a  democracy,  and  our  super-
structure is  plutocratic.  Our  people  feel  the  burden,  but  they
have  not  yet  discovered  what  the  burden  is."

"And  when  they  do?"  I  asked,  a  little  defiantly.
"When  they  do,"  replied  Krebs,  "they  will  set  about
making  the  plutocrats  happy.  Now  plutocrats  are  discon-
tented, and  never  satisfied ;  the  more  they  get,  the  more  they
want,  the  more  they  are  troubled  by  what  other  people
have."

I  smiled  in  spite  of  myself.
"Your  interest  in  —  in  plutocrats  is  charitable,  then?"

"Why,  yes,"  he  said,  "my  interest  in  all  kinds  of  people
is  charitable.  However  improbable  it  may  seem,  I  have
no  reason  to  dislike  or  envy  people  who  have  more  than
they  know  what  to  do  with."  And  the  worst  of  it  was  he
looked  it.  He  managed  somehow  simply  by  sitting  there
with  his  strange  eyes  fixed  upon  me  —  in  spite  of  his  ridic-
ulous philosophy  —  to  belittle  my  ambitions,  to  make
of  small  worth  my  achievements,  to  bring  home  to  me  the
fact  that  in  spite  of  these  I  was  neither  contented  nor  happy :
though  he  kept  his  humour  and  his  poise,  he  implied  an
experience  that  was  far  deeper,  more  tragic  and  more  signifi-
cant than  mine.  I  was  goaded  into  making  an  injudicious
remark.
"Well,  your  campaign  against  Ennerly  and  Jackson  fell
through,  didn't  it  ? "  Ennerly  and  Jackson  were  the  city
officials  who  had  been  tried.
"It  wasn't  a  campaign  against  them,"  he  answered.
