“I suppose next you’ll be saying there’s nothing good in the white man’s civilization—that we all ought to start living in straw huts and growing rice and nice, fat mice for our food?” Jimmie challenged him, almost surlily.
But Meekins, young, eager, enthusiastic, was thoroughly aroused. His eyes shone behind his horn-rimmed spectacles and his blonde hair rose belligerently above his flushed fair face.
“No, I don’t mean anything of the kind,” he said, leaning towards Jimmie. “Our civilization has undoubted advantages—we have developed the sciences and we have developed machinery and invention to a point the world’s never reached before. Our gods are steam and electricity and steel—we have combated plagues and disease, we have greater material comfort, we can travel farther and faster than ever before. But when that’s granted—”
“Seems to me,” Jimmie interrupted triumphantly, “you’ve granted about everything that’s worth considering.”
“No—no, Mr. Forrester, I haven’t though. We’ve developed the printing-press and the telephone and telegraph and the radio, but what has been the result? We’ve made it possible to spread faster and more easily bigotry and hatred and intolerance and give more power to the mob, whether represented by the crowd that beats up a crowd of Jews or Germans or Russians or Negroes or whether it’s represented by nations fighting each other for spoils in some part of the world. And we call ourselves free men, boast of it. Such a notion is silly—we are all of us petty little creatures who are slaves to the newspaper and the radio, to politicians and mouthy preachers, to our employers and the movies, to the telephone and every other regimented idea or thing.”