, my wife and I have held ourselves socially
aloof, because those with whom we would naturally and even inevitably
associate would be precisely those who would some day beset me for
immunities and favors. And how can one hold to a course of any sort of
justice, if doing so means assailing all one's friends and their friends
and relatives? For who are the offenders? They are of the rich, of the
successful, of the clever, of the socially agreeable and charming. And
how can one enforce justice against one's dinner companions--and in
favor of whom? Of the people, voiceless, distant, unknown to one.
Personal friendship on the one side; on the other, an abstraction."

"I should not class you among those likely to yield many inches to the
social bribe," said I.

"That is pleasant, but not candid," replied he with his simple
directness. "No man of your experience could fail to know that the
social bribe is the arch-corrupter, the one briber whom it is not in
human nature to resist. But, as I was saying, to my amazement, in spite
of my wife's precautions and mine, I find myself beset--and with what
devilish insidiousness! When I refuse, simply to save myself from
flagrant treachery to my obligations of duty, I find myself seeming,
even to my wife and to myself, churlish and priggish; Pharisaical, in
the loathsome attitude of a moral _poseur_. Common honesty, in presence
of this social bribe, takes on the sneaking seeming of rottenest
hypocrisy. It is indeed hard to get through and to get at the men I want
and need, and must and will have."

"Impossible," said I. "And if you could get at them, and if the Senate
would let you put them where they seem to you to belong, the temptation
would be too much for them. They too would soon become Baal-worshipers,
the more assiduous for their long abstinence."

"Some," he admitted, "perhaps most. But at least a few would stand the
test--and just one such would repay and justify all the labor of all the
search. The trouble with you pessimists is that you don't take our
ancestry into account. Man isn't a falling angel, but a rising animal.
So, every impulse toward the decent, every gleam of light, is a
tremendous gain. The wonder isn't the bad but the good, isn't that we
are so imperfect, but that in such a few thousand years we've got so
far--so far _up_. I know you and I have in the main the same
purpose--where is there a man who'd like to think the world the worse
for his having lived?