Settembrini glared at him. “Be quiet, Engineer,” he said, with a severity probably due to nervous irritation. “Inform yourself, but don’t try to express your views. That is an answer, at least,” he said, turning to Naphta again. “It gives me cold comfort, but it is an answer. Let us examine all the consequences flowing from it. Along with industry, your Christian communism would reject machinery, technique, material progress. Along with what you call trade⁠—money and finance, which in antiquity ranked higher than agriculture and manual labour⁠—you reject freedom. For it is clear, so clear as to be evident to the meanest intelligence, that all social relations, public and private, would be attached to the soil, as in the Middle Ages; even⁠—I feel some reluctance to say it⁠—even the person of the individual. If only the soil can maintain life, then only the possession of it can confer freedom. Manual labourers and peasants, however honourable their position, if they possess no real property, can only be the property of those who do. As a matter of fact, until well on in the Middle Ages the great mass of the population, even the town-dwellers, were serfs. In the course of our discussion you have let fall various allusions to the dignity of the human being. Yet you are defending the morality of an economic system which deprives the individual of liberty and self-respect.”