Hardy had a way of throwing life into what he was talking about, and,
like many men with strong opinions, and passionate natures, either
carried his hearers off their legs and away with him altogether,
or roused every spark of combativeness in them. The latter was the
effect which his lecture on the Punic Wars had on Tom. He made several
protests as Hardy went on; but Grey’s anxious looks kept him from going
fairly into action, till Hardy stuck the black pin, which represented
Scipio, triumphantly in the middle of Carthage, and, turning round
said, “And now for some tea, Grey, before you have to turn out.”
Tom opened fire while the tea was brewing.
“You couldn’t say anything bad enough about aristocracies this morning,
Hardy, and now to-night you are crowing over the success of the
heaviest and cruelest oligarchy that ever lived, and praising them up
to the skies.”
“Hullo! here’s a breeze!” said Hardy, smiling; “but I rejoice, O Brown,
in that they thrashed the Carthaginians, and not, as you seem to think,
in that they, being aristocrats, thrashed the Carthaginians; for
oligarchs they were not at this time.”
“At any rate they answer to the Spartans in the struggle, and the
Carthaginians to the Athenians; and yet all your sympathies are with
the Romans to-night in the Punic Wars, though they were with the
Athenians before dinner.”
“I deny your position. The Carthaginians were nothing but a great
trading aristocracy—with a glorious family or two I grant you, like
that of Hannibal; but, on the whole, a dirty, bargain-driving,
buy-cheap-and-sell-dear aristocracy—of whom the world was well rid.
They like the Athenians indeed! Why, just look what the two people have
left behind them——”
“Yes,” interrupted Tom; “but we only know the Carthaginians through the
reports of their destroyers. Your heroes trampled them out with hoofs
of iron.”
“Do you think the Roman hoof could have trampled out their Homer if
they ever had one?” said Hardy. “The Romans conquered Greece too,
remember.”
“But Greece was never so near beating them.”
“True. But I hold to my point. Carthage was the mother of all
hucksters, compassing sea and land to sell her wares.”
“And no bad line of life for a nation. At least Englishmen ought to
think so.”
“No, they ought not; at least if ‘Punica fides’ is to be the rule of
trade. Selling any amount of Brummagem wares never did nation or man
much good, and never will. Eh, Grey?”
Grey winced at being appealed to, but remarked that he hoped the Church
would yet be able to save England from the fate of Tyre and Carthage,
the great trading nations of the old world: and then, swallowing his
tea, and looking as if he had been caught robbing a hen-roost, he made
a sudden exit, and hurried away out of college to the night-school.
“What a pity he is so odd and shy,” said Tom; “I should so like to know
more of him.”
“It _is_ a pity. He is much better when he is alone with me. I think he
has heard from some of the set that you are a furious Protestant, and
sees an immense amount of stiff-neckedness in you.”
“But about England and Carthage,” said Tom, shirking the subject of his
own peculiarities; “you don’t really think us like them? It gave me a
turn to hear you translating ‘Punica fides’ into Brummagem wares just
now.”
“I think that successful trade is our rock ahead. The devil who holds
new markets and twenty per cent. profits in his gift is the devil that
England has most to fear from. ‘Because of unrighteous dealings, and
riches gotten by deceit, the kingdom is translated from one people to
another,’ said the wise man. Grey falls back on the Church, you see,
to save the nation; but the Church he dreams of will never do it. Is
there any that can? There _must_ be surely, or we have believed a lie.
But this work of making trade righteous, of Christianizing trade,
looks like the very hardest the Gospel has ever had to take in hand—in
England at any rate.”
Hardy spoke slowly and doubtfully, and paused as if asking for Tom’s
opinion.
“I never heard it put in that way. I know very little of politics or
the state of England. But come, now; the putting down the slave-trade
and compensating our planters, _that_ shows that we are not sold to the
trade-devil yet, surely.”
“I don’t think we are. No, thank God, there are plenty of signs that we
are likely to make a good fight of it yet.”