The Secret Power

"Oh! May I have your definition?"

"Why yes!--of course you may! Love, to my thinking, means complete harmony between two souls--like two notes that make a perfect chord. The man must feel that he can thoroughly trust and reverence the woman,--the woman must feel the same towards the man. And the sense of 'reverence' is perhaps the best and most binding quality. But nowadays what woman will you find worth reverence?--what man so free from drink and debauchery as to command it? The human beings of our day are often less respectable than the beasts! I can imagine love,--what it might be--what it should be--but till we have a very different and more spiritualised world, the thing is impossible."

Again, Gwent was silent for some minutes. Then he said-"Apparently the spirit of destructiveness is strong in you. As 'master of the world'--to quote your own words, I presume that in the event of a nation or nations deciding on war, you would give them a time-limit to consider and hold conference, with their allies--and then--if they were resolved to begin hostilities--"

"Then I could--and WOULD--wipe them off the face of the earth in twenty-four hours!" said Seaton, calmly--"From nations they should become mere dust-heaps! War makes its own dust-heaps, but with infinitely more cost and trouble--the way of exit I offer would be cheap in comparison!"

Gwent smiled a grim smile.

"Well, I come back to my former question"--he said--"Suppose the occasion arose, and you did all this, what pleasure to yourself do you foresee?"

"The pleasure of clearing the poor old earth of some of its pestilential microbes!"--answered Seaton, "Something of the same thankful satisfaction Sir Ronald Ross must have experienced when he discovered the mosquito-breeders of yellow fever and malaria, and caused them to be stamped out. The men who organise national disputes are a sort of mosquito, infecting their fellow-creatures with perverted mentality and disease,--they should be exterminated."

"Why not begin with the newspaper offices?" suggested Gwent--"The purlieus of cheap journalism are the breeding-places of the human malaria-mosquito."

"True! And it wouldn't be a bad idea to stamp them out," here Seaton threw back his head with the challenging gesture which was characteristic of his temperament--"But what is called 'the liberty of the press'(it should be called 'the license of the press') is more of an octopus than a mosquito. Cut off one tentacle, it grows another. It's entirely octopus in character, too,--it only lives to fill its stomach."