churches. Only one has to speak the language of one’s own people. You know the priests are forbidding the people to read the Hymns?”
“What does that matter?” said Cipriano. “These people are nothing if not perverse, nowadays. They will read them all the more.”
“Maybe!—I shall take no notice. I’ll let my new legend, as they call it, grow while the earth is moist. But we have to keep our eye very close on all the little bunches of ‘interests’.”
“Ramón!” said Cipriano. “If you can turn Mexico entirely into a Quetzalcoatl country, what then?”
“I shall be First Man of Quetzalcoatl—I know no more.”
“You won’t trouble about the rest of the world?”
Ramón smiled. Already he saw in Cipriano’s eye the gleam of a Holy War.
“I would like,” he said smiling, “to be one of the Initiates of the Earth. One of the Initiators. Every country its own Saviour, Cipriano: or every people its own Saviour. And the First Men of every people, forming a Natural Aristocracy of the World. One must have aristocrats, that we know. But natural ones, not artificial. And in some way the world must be organically united: the world of man. But in the concrete, not in the abstract. Leagues and Covenants and International Programmes. Ah! Cipriano! it’s like an international pestilence. The leaves of one great tree can’t hang on the boughs of another great tree. The races of the earth are like trees, in the end they neither mix nor mingle. They stand out of each other’s way, like trees. Or else they crowd on one another, and their roots grapple, and it is the fight to the death.—Only from the flowers there is commingling. And the flowers of