Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/102

 fact that those who ordered the sanguinary acts were never the ones who carried them out. It is not clear that this division of responsibility diminishes the horror for the victim. But one readily understands that a cultivated judge who, in the purity of his military idealism, had ordered the shooting of Edith Cavell would sleep the better on the following night if he were not obliged to see the English nurse actually crumple up under the fire of his own rifle. Or, to remove the matter from the hot air of controversy, take the case of Pontius Pilate. As he appears to have been a man of some fineness of sensibility and at the same time tainted with Teutonic idealism, it is more than likely that he refrained from visiting Golgotha to investigate the mere physical consequences of his having washed his hands of responsibility. He withdrew, I suspect, into his own cultivated though somewhat unimaginative mind, and left the eye-witnessing of the thing to a squad of soldiers under orders and to calloused workmen handy with hammer and nails."

"You mean to suggest that if Pilate had possessed a lively imagination, he might not have washed his hands?"

"Just that," said Thorpe. "I attribute the cruelty of his refined nature to his shrinking