"But, you may ask, since I am convinced I am to die in any event, why do I not publish the manuscript now? I answer that it is in the nature of an act of submission. I swore to keep these matters secret from the world. In intention, I broke my oath. The punishment at once gathered over my head. I acquiesce in the justice of it. It is the difference between the criminal who confesses on the scaffold and the coward who professes innocence to the end, between dying contrite and dying in revolt. I have chosen the former course. It still sounds wild and incredible? That view, too, I think you will come to abandon. "But, you say again, was it a comradely act to pass the narrative on to you? I reply, not uncomradely. The detonator is harmless enough in a situation where it cannot be touched off. So with this manuscript. I am convinced, nay, certain, that no danger threatens you so long as you hold the secret close in your own bosom. It is no blind unreasoning malignance we have to deal with, but a sentient power, and as I now see, a just one, meting out punishment only where there is guilt. I have been guilty: therefore I am doomed. You, so long as you keep the secret, are guiltless: you will be unharmed. Why, then, have I not destroyed the manuscript and with it the risk of betrayal? Because, as I have written before, I do not believe it was intended that the secret should perish utterly for the outer world. Perhaps, in years to come, the powers which forbade me to reveal these matters will lift the veto. Should that occur, have no doubt that they will find means to convey their will to you, they, who have found no difficulty in making known to me, over a distance of untold miles, that I must die. "Till then, comrade, lock this secret in the innermost recesses of your soul. Hold the manuscript safe. Leave nothing to chance. Deposit it under seal with your bankers or your lawyers, with instructions that nothing is to be done with it without your express command, and that should you die without giving that command, the package is to be destroyed unopened. For I say again that there is a doom in it, a doom which I now see approach me as clearly as I see from the window of this hotel the big, butt-ended freighters swinging on the tide of Whangpu River.