Page:The genius - Carl Grosse tr Joseph Trapp 1796.djvu/214

 and her children. Having received her most fervent blessings, I took my leave of her, deeply moved with this horrid scene of human affliction.

Thus I spent the three first hours after my arrival at Alcantara in the deliverance of one innocent man, and in making to the relict of another, that had perished unjustly, some sort of compensation for the cruel and irreparable loss she had sustained. Such were the laws which humanity prescribed to my conduct, and which, in my opinion, ought always to outweigh the secondary considerations of friendship and polite custom. The genteel and the ceremonious will wonder, why I did not first visit my friends; but I will answer them, that where the life of the innocent is at stake, humanity justly claims our first care, and as justly supersedes the offices of friendship. To have acted otherwise, would have been fixing an indelible sigma of remorse upon my conscience. My friends were perfectly safe, they neither suffered from want nor from the galling chains of imprisonment, while, on the other hand,