"Oh, come, I won't have our boys maligned. I have lived among them for years, remember, while you are only a new-comer. Granted that they are greedy. They are only greedy as children are. They are like children----" "Exactly. They are like children. They could not be like anything worse." "What!" cried Patrington, with a look of horror, "have you no faith in the goodness and purity of a child?" "In its goodness, not a whit! Purity, yes; the purity of ignorance, which we call innocence, and pretend to admire as an exquisite and touching attribute of the undeveloped human being. These blackies are just as good and just as bad as the average child; greedy, grasping, selfish; selfish, grasping, greedy; ready to kiss the feet of the man who comes back to the village with an antelope on his shoulder; ready to send a poisoned arrow after him if on parting company he refuses to be swindled out of cloth or beads. They are bad, Patrington--if I were not a disciple of Locke, I would say they are innately bad. But what does that matter? We are all bad." "What a pleasant way you have of looking at life and your fellow-men!" said Patrington. "I look life and my fellow-man full in the face, and I ask myself if there is any man living whose nature--noble, perhaps, according to the world's esteem--does not include a latent capacity for evil. Every man and every woman, the best as well as the worst, is a potential criminal. Do you think _that_ Macbeth who came over the heath at sundown after the battle, flushed with victory, was a scoundrel? Not he. There was not a captain in the Scottish army more loyal to his king. He was only an ambitious man. Temptation and opportunity did all the rest. Temptation, were it only strong enough, and opportunity, would make a murderer of you or me." "'Lead us not into temptation.' Oh, wondrous wise and simple prayer, which riseth every night and morning out of the mouths of babes and sucklings over all the Christian world, and in a few brief phrases includes every aspiration needful for humanity!" said Cecil Patrington, who was in matters theological just where he had been when his boyish head was bowed under the Episcopal hand on the day of his confirmation. Far away from new books and new opinions, knowing not the names of Spencer or Clifford, Schopenhauer or Hartmann, this rough traveller's religion was the unquestioning faith of Paul Dombey, of Hester Summerson and Agnes Whitfield and Little Nell, of all the gentlest creatures in the dream-world of Charles Dickens.