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370 have imagined that I would have wanted to read it for myself, and when you refused I remembered some special reasons why you should not have been the man to deny me that right." His voice changed suddenly. He sighed. "I don't believe I thought much after that," he said. "If I had I hope I'd have behaved differently. What illogical, disreputably-minded beings we are—all of us. And yet how splendid we are—most of us."

"Ducane, for instance," said Dick bitterly.

"I was thinking of Robison. And you believed that I wanted to destroy that paper? The thing has gone far beyond that—unless I could at the same time destroy the deed and the conditions that made for it."

A twinge of mental or physical pain stopped him. Dick lit his pipe with hurried, impatient hands. His own part in this affair seemed to be showing less nobly. But how could he have known? And then, with sudden force, the explanation hit him. A man naturally judges others by himself.

"We recognise the responsibility of the criminal fast enough," said Tempest slowly. "I wonder if we are always so sure of his identity."

"She did it long before I had any"

"Leave the personal element out," said Tempest. "We can't alter that by discussing it. I told you it had gone far beyond that. But—because the representation will lie in your hands now, I want to speak to you about this. We white men make and enforce the criminal laws of a country. But it is not taken sufficiently into consideration that in very many cases we also make the conditions, which, later on, call for the enforcements of those laws. So that the punishment, when it falls, often falls on the wrong person."

His voice was so quiet that Dick could not guess in how far his heart was stirred.

"That's an old story," he said. "It's the same all the world over. We can't help it. We are only sufficiently advanced to see the obvious yet. We do our best—with the limited sense we've got."

"I don't think we do. We don't take into consideration the fact that the civilisation of those who make the