I sat there and looked at him; I had known of him, he spoke nearly every Sunday in some church, and took up collections for the reform to which, quite sincerely, I believe, he was devoting his life. Then I said: “But that isn’t my idea even of politics, to say nothing of ethics.” I believe now that he had no conception of the moral significance of his suggestion that we have an implied understanding which I was to be at liberty to deny if the exigencies of politics suggested it. He was a reformer, belonging to the order of the indurated mind. He was possessed by a theory, which held his mind in the relentless mould of its absolutism, and there his mind had hardened, and, alas, his heart, too, no doubt--so that its original impressions were all fixed and immutable, and not subject to change; they could not be erased nor could any new impressions be superimposed. He was convinced that his particular theory was correct, and that if only it could be imposed on mankind, the world would be infinitely better off; and that hence any means, no matter what, were permissible in effecting this imposition, because of the good that would follow. It is an old mental attitude in this world, well treated of in books, and understood and recognized by everyone except those who adopt it, and in its spirit every new reform is promulgated by its avatar. But the reformer never thinks of himself in any such light, of course, he does not understand it any more than he understands mankind’s distrust of him. It is the instinctive fear of the theorist that has been felt for every one of them from Robespierre, the archtype, and impossibilist par excellence, down to the latest man haranguing his little idle crowd on the street corner. XL