plastic sacks.
And the more he thought about it, the more increasingly
uncomfortable he felt in his position of power. More than the
vanquished independent coffeehouses, one thing in particular
niggled him: The malnourished hordes who picked their coffee, those
who provided the fuel that we may progress. That never progressed
themselves. All Morris’ vaunted rationality could never help them.
Now that they had reached a kind of plateau, Roy wondered
whether they could employ the growing wealth of Biddenbrooks to
help the poor that picked their beans. But Bidden parried.
“Okay, we’ll just send them paychecks,” he said. “And we’ll be
broke tomorrow. It’s not our fault they’re poor. At least we’re giving
them work.”
“Is it that difficult?” Roy wondered.
Morris replied, “Some might say it’s that simple. We’ve moved
past agriculture. They haven’t. The poor are the dregs of history.
There will always be dregs.”
“But couldn’t we try and help them?” Roy wondered. “Find a way
to…”
“Look,” Morris boomed, “Every altruistic movement in the
history of mankind has been a farce,” he insisted, “Romanticism, the
French revolution, Utopianism, Communism, hippies, welfare. You
can’t mandate people to be nice to each other. You always end up
worse than when you started.”
Ellie pushed at the water playfully. She said, “Love’s supply just
isn’t keeping up with its demand.”
“Exactly. That’s why it’s so expensive,” Morris averred, “Look
what happened when the Russians tried to build a unified society
based on love. It ended in disaster. The biggest country in the world
supported by the rarest resource in the world. It might as well have
been built on fairy dust.”
Roy sipped at his Sambuca thoughtfully. “So what you’re saying
is, we should be trying to figure out how to increase the supply of
love?”
“I’m not saying anything of the sort! If love was easy to come by
it wouldn’t be worth much.”
“Wouldn’t it? Air is easy to come by and it’s pretty valuable.”
“But we can take air for granted. It’s beyond value.”
“Well what about fresh water? And fire? Our ancestors couldn’t
take them for granted. They were rare and hard to maintain. Now
ABYSSINIA
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