IST VOICE. Then we shall have to build three keels to your

one.

2ND VOICE. Then we shall have to demand a new military credit.

A slight pause. They walk the length of the deck.

IST VOICE. How delightful it is to realize that your Excellency is a countryman of the illustrious thinker who wrote the first Treatise on Perpetual Peace!

2ND VOICE. I cannot tell you, Excellency, how eagerly I am looking forward to your elucidation of Hegel's principle of Universal Reconciliation.

IST VOICE. Ah, yes, Hegel's Versöhnung, the Reconciliation of Contradictions. That is at the bottom of philosophy, to my humble thinking.

2ND VOICE. The Reconciliation of Contradictions as the guiding principle in history! What a depth in that notion! Which reminds me: Does your Government happen to have any engagements besides those we are aware of?

IST VOICE. That depends upon what you are aware of; but surely your Excellency must be aware of everything that is in the least degree interesting. Yes, yes! Versöhnung! What a wonderful principle! Versöhn . . .

The gramophone wheezes. The screen becomes blank.

SATAN inserts another disc. The cinema shows the interior of a sugar refinery in foreign parts; through the window a group of tall chimneys are belching black smoke into a withered pine and a medieval belfry. The place is flagged and garlanded, and a brass band is braying at the foot of a staircase among a crowd of sickly and ragged workpeople. This is in honour of a Minister who has been visiting the factory in company with several manufacturers in closebuttoned frockcoats, with lavender kid gloves stuck in the breast; also a General covered with gold, a prelate with

purple buttons down his front, and a professor in spectacles, manuscript bulging his pockets. On a table, along with cigars, is a tray of thick sandwiches and tall glasses of a steaming beverage.

THE MINISTER (while the band plays downstairs). Let me congratulate you on the excellence of your punch. It gives a most favourable impression of your sugar, my dear Baron. May I examine a lump? (Takes one from the sugar-basin and examines it carefully through his eyeglass.) Ha! beautifully crystalline-a credit to our country!

IST MANUFACTURER. No, Excellency, this really is canesugar, not beetroot, as better suited for punch. . . . Our own sugar, owing to the chemical properties of our soil, is rather deficient . . . I mean, it has none of that cloying sweetness which obliges one to use cane-sugar with so much discretion for ordinary purposes.

THE MINISTER. Ah! I quite understand. (Raises his glass.) I drink to our beetroot-sugar industry, which, thanks to the wonderful commercial genius of this distinguished syndicate —and, I may add, the fostering care of an enlightened Government, which knows how to temper theoretical Free Trade with practical Protection-has filled this once sylvan district with tall chimneys and given work in abundance-I am told wages rise to fourteen shillings weekly in good years-to thousands of industrious families who were languishing in the monotony of a corn-grower's life.

Everyone bows and clinks glasses. At a sign of the chief manufacturer the crowd shouts "Long live our illustrious Minister of Agriculture and Commerce!" and disperses. The gentlemen, after much bowing, take seats and go on drinking and smoking huge cigars.

IST MANUFACTURER. Well, my dear Minister, you have now seen the miracles which beetroot-sugar has accomplished;

the desert, as the Prophet says, has blossomed like a rose! (He waves towards the chimneys, which are emitting a very sickening smoke. Everyone claps.) Well, what my fellowdirectors and myself beg you now to say to our Government is that all this splendid progress is threatened by a very serious deficit which is staring our shareholders in the face. Fostered by wise Government measures which protected our infant manufacture from alien competition, our beet-sugar industry has attracted so much capital and labour that we have increased our plant and production, and now find ourselves with vast quantities of sugar which the country, I grieve to say, refuses to absorb with the celerity needed for our dividends. . .

...

ANOTHER MANUFACTURER. What our illustrious Baron says applies almost exactly to the steel industry, which has developed so miraculously, considering our country's total lack of coal and iron.

ANOTHER MANUFACTURER. The cotton industry is not in quite so bad a way yet, but the high prices at which, thanks to wise Governmental fostering, we have been able to sell our wares by the exclusion of foreign ones, is resulting in a remarkable contraction of the demand. People are going about in rags, as your Excellency doubtless notices.

THE MINISTER (getting uncomfortable). Well, my dear Baron-for a grateful country honours you by the title of Baron of Sugar, Baron of Steel, and Baron of Cotton-why not sell outside the country?

The Manufacturers look at each other aghast.

IST MANUFACTURER. But sugar is only a quarter the price in other countries. Our climate is unfavourable.

2ND MANUFACTURER. But I had explained that we have neither iron nor coal, and that a spade or scythe costs four times as much in our country as abroad.

3RD MANUFACTURER. You can get six English cotton shirts for the price of one of ours!

THE MINISTER. In that case, I really don't see what I can do for you!

IST MANUFACTURER (solemnly). Sir, this illustrious geographer here will inform you that there exist, not very far from our seas and in close contact with some of those Colonies which spread our civilization, a Nation of Negroes

PROFESSOR (bows and pulls MS. out of his pocket). Negroes now subjects of the Queen of Sheba, but whom monolithic monuments there show to have been under the influence of our ancestors of the later Stone Age; moreover, pronouncedly Brachycephalous and . . .

...

IST MANUFACTURER (pushes the PROFESSOR aside). Quite so, quite so. Our illustrious geographer was going to add that these negroes

...

PROFESSOR. . . . Brachycephalous, please remember, and possessing monolithic monuments . . .

IST MANUFACTURER. . . . Already consume many thousand tons of cane-sugar from the West Indies . .

2ND MANUFActurer.

Import a considerable supply of

steel and iron implements from England.

...

3RD MANUFACTURER. . . . Clothe themselves, however scantily, in cotton goods from India . . .

THE MINISTER. Ah!

IST MANUFACTURER. Well, sir, these negroes

PROFESSOR.... Distinctly Brachycephalous, and connected with our ancestors by these monolithic monuments ... IST MANUFACTURER. . . . These negroes must be made to eat, or at least buy, our sugar.

2ND MANUFACTURER. They must use our iron and steel implements, and, if possible, our steel rails.

3RD MANUFACTURER. They must clothe themselves, so far as the climate allows of any clothing, in our cotton goods. THE MINISTER. Do you expect me to order your Brachy... negroes to transfer their custom to you?

PROFESSOR. Allow me to answer his Excellency. These negroes, being, as I said, Brachycephalous and closely connected by their monuments with our own earliest civilization, are ardently desirous of being reunited to our ancient—I might say primæval-Empire.

IST MANUFACTURER. And once this desire is fulfilled, they will naturally benefit by all the progress we have since achieved. They will participate in our administration and be shielded by our laws; and, of course, our beneficent system of commercial and industrial protection . . .

GENERAL. They will enrol themselves, or be conscripted, enthusiastically under our victorious banners, and form a contingent the more important that their birth-rate runs to thirty or forty children apiece.

PRELATE. They will abandon their idolatry and embrace our pure and peaceful religion, abjuring the slave trade.

THE MINISTER. But what you propose means a war of annexation; and besides the Queen of Sheba, who at present owns these negroes, I am informed that every other nation, except the one which already supplies them with necessaries under a mistaken Free Trade regime, has earmarked them similarly for annexation.

GENERAL. But we can conquer them with next to no expense or loss of time from our Colonies.

PRELATE. But the Barefooted Friars have already bought immense tracts of land among them for their missionary schools, and our pious Clerical Banks have mortgaged other vast tracts from their chiefs.