Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/93

 TRAVELING WITH A REFORMER

ishing such infringements of them as came under his personal notice.

It was a good scheme, but I thought it would keep a body in trouble all the time; it seemed to me that one would be always trying to get offend ing little officials discharged, and perhaps getting laughed at for all reward. But he said no, I had the wrong idea; that there was no occasion to get anybody discharged; that in fact you mustn t get anybody discharged; that that would itself be a failure; no, one must reform the man reform him and make him useful where he was.

&quot;Must one report the offender and then beg his superior not to discharge him, but reprimand him and keep him?&quot;

&quot;No, that is not the idea; you don t report him at all, for then you risk his bread and butter. You can act as if you are going to report him when nothing else will answer. But that s an extreme case. That is a sort of force, and force is bad. Diplomacy is the effective thing. Now if a man has tact if a man will exercise diplomacy

For two minutes we had been standing at a tele graph wicket, and during all this time the Major had been trying to get the attention of one of the young operators, but they were all busy skylarking. The Major spoke now, and asked one of them to take his telegram. He got for reply:

&quot;I reckon you can wait a minute, can t you?&quot; and the skylarking went on.

The Major said yes, he was not in a hurry. Then he wrote another telegram:

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