Page:The Inheritors, An Extravagant Story.djvu/179

 it on its foul way. God knows I had little of the humanitarian in me. If people must murder in the by-ways of an immense world, they must do murder and pay the price. But that I should have been mixed up in such was not what I had wanted. I must have done with it all; with all this sort of thing, must get back to my old self, must get back. I seemed to hear the slow words of the Duc de Mersch.

"We have increased the exports by so much; the imports by so much. We have protected the natives, have kept their higher interests ever present in our minds. And through it all we have never forgotten the mission entrusted to us by Europe—to remove the evil of darkness from the earth—to root out barbarism with its nameless horrors, whose existence has been a blot on our consciences. Men of good-will and self-sacrifice are doing it now—are laying down their priceless lives to root out . . . to root out . . ."

Of course they were rooting them out.

It didn't very much matter to me. One supposes that that sort of native exists for that sort of thing—to be rooted out by men of good-will,