ich I
have dug up in the last fortnight. This bracelet alone would bring
me the three hundred and fifty crowns I need. And with all of it I
might make a fine career for myself. Then I could get the
illustrations made for my treatise at once; I could get my work
printed, and--I could travel! Why don't I do it, do you suppose?

MR. Y. I suppose you are afraid to be found out.

MR. X. That, too, perhaps. But don't you think an intelligent
fellow like myself might fix matters so that he was never found
out? I am alone all the time--with nobody watching me--while I am
digging out there in the fields. It wouldn't be strange if I put
something in my own pockets now and then.

MR. Y. Yes, but the worst danger lies in disposing of the stuff.

MR. X. Pooh! I'd melt it down, of course--every bit of it--and
then I'd turn it into coins--with just as much gold in them as
genuine ones, of course--

MR. Y. Of course!

MR. X. Well, you can easily see why. For if I wanted to dabble in
counterfeits, then I need not go digging for gold first. [Pause]
It is a strange thing anyhow, that if anybody else did what I
cannot make myself do, then I'd be willing to acquit him--but I
couldn't possibly acquit myself. I might even make a brilliant
speech in defence of the thief, proving that this gold was _res
nullius_, or nobody's, as it had been deposited at a time when
property rights did not yet exist; that even under existing rights
it could belong only to the first finder of it, as the ground-owner
has never included it in the valuation of his property; and so on.

MR. Y. And probably it would be much easier for you to do this if
the--hm!--the thief had not been prompted by actual need, but by a
mania for collecting, for instance--or by scientific aspirations--
by the ambition to keep a discovery to himself. Don't you think
so?

MR. X. You mean that I could not acquit him if actual need had
been the motive? Yes, for that's the only motive which the law
will not accept in extenuation. That motive makes a plain theft of
it.

MR. Y. And this you couldn't excuse?

MR. X. Oh, excuse--no, I guess not, as the law wouldn't. On the
other hand, I must admit that it would be hard for me to charge a
collector with theft merely because he had appropriated some
specimen not yet represented in his own collection.

MR. Y. So that vanity or ambition might excuse what could not be
excused by need?

MR. X. And yet need ought to be the more tellin