Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/247

 pledge, we will waive that in your case, and you and I can have a little private understanding—no one need ever know, and you can say" he was gently tapping the ends of his fingers together, and the last terms of his proposal seemed to be absorbed by an expression of vulpine significance so eloquent and plain in its meaning that mere words were superfluous.

I sat there and looked at him; I had known of him, he spoke nearly every Sunday in some church, and took up collections for the reform to which, quite sincerely, I believe, he was devoting his life. Then I said:

"But that isn't my idea even of politics, to say nothing of ethics."

I believe now that he had no conception of the moral significance of his suggestion that we have an implied understanding which I was to be at liberty to deny if the exigencies of politics suggested it. He was a reformer, belonging to the order of the indurated mind. He was possessed by a theory, which held his mind in the relentless mould of its absolutism, and there his mind had hardened, and, alas, his heart, too, no doubt—so that its original impressions were all fixed and immutable, and not subject to change; they could not be erased nor could any new impressions be superimposed. He was convinced that his particular theory was correct, and that if only it could be imposed on mankind, the world would be infinitely better off; and that hence any means, no matter what, were permissible in effecting this imposition, because of the good that