“They don’t choose. They are tricked into a new form of servility, no more. They go from bad to worse.”
“You yourself—aren’t you free?” she asked.
“I?” he laughed. “I spent a long time trying to pretend. I thought I could have my own way. Till I realised that having my own way meant only running about smelling all the things in the street, like a dog that will pick up something. Of myself, I have no way. No man has any way in himself. Every man who goes along a way is led by one of three things: by an appetite—and I class ambition among appetite; or by an idea; or by an inspiration.”
“I used to think my husband was inspired about Ireland,” said Kate doubtfully.
“And now?”
“Yes! Perhaps he put his wine in old, rotten bottles that wouldn’t hold it. No!—Liberty is a rotten old wine-skin. It won’t hold one’s wine of inspiration or passion any more,” she said.
“And Mexico!” he said. “Mexico is another Ireland. Ah no, no man can be his own master. If I must serve, I will not serve an idea, which cracks and leaks like an old wine-skin. I will serve the God that gives me my manhood. There is no liberty for a man, apart from the God of his manhood. Free Mexico is a bully, and the old, colonial, ecclesiastical Mexico was another sort of bully. When man has nothing but his will to assert—even his good-will—it is always bullying. Bolshevism is one sort of bullying, capitalism another: and liberty is a change of chains.”
“Then what’s to be done?” said Kate. “Just nothing?”
And with her own will, she wanted nothing to be done. Let the skies fall!