een first suggested to him by a pregnant and suggestive
saying of mine some months before. “What! when you were so hot for
the abolition of the punishment by death?” Oh dear no. He’d changed
his mind about that long ago. “Was it when you were advocating the
desirability of the labourers having the cows and the landlords keeping
the land?” “No, no! I’ve improved greatly upon that. Haven’t you heard?
I’m for letting the landlord keep the cows, but giving the labourers
the calves only; that appears to me the equitable adjustment of a
complex question.” I thought a little, and Polus gave me time. What was
it? What could it have been that we had been talking about? Enfantin’s
hullucinations and the dual priesthood (_couple-prêtre_)? Fourrier’s
Phalanstery? It must have been an _obiter dictum_ which dropped from
me as he laid down the law about Proudhon. I shook my head. “Don’t you
remember? Entails!”

Then it appeared that the great League was to be started for the
abolition of everything in the shape of entails. In our last conference
I had let fall the remark that for every acre of land tied up in strict
entail there was a thousand pounds sterling tied up in much stricter
entail. If you are going to deal with the one, why not with the other?
Polus was putting on his hat when I gave him that parting dig, and I
thought I had silenced him for ever. So far from it, I had but sown a
new seed in his soul, and now he came to show me the baby.

Polus meanwhile had plunged into the heaving billows of statistics.
He had discovered, to his own satisfaction, that 500 millions of
the National Debt was strictly entailed; that 217 millions belonged
prospectively to babes unborn; that the British people were paying
“enormous taxes, sir!” not only for the sins and extravagances of their
forefathers, but for enriching of their hypothetical progeny. That it
was a state of things altogether outrageous, irrational, monstrous, and
a great many other epithets. Would I join the League? Of course I’d
joi