ious military officer who should discover the deficiencies of his
country's military organization and denounce them to his superiors and
perhaps to the public--thereby fulfilling his duty--and who, when on
active service, should refuse to carry out an operation which he was
ordered to undertake, believing that there was but scant probability of
success or rather certainty of failure, so long as these deficiencies
remained unremedied. He would deserve to be shot. And as for this
question of Pharisaism ...

And there is always a way of obeying an order while yet retaining the
command, a way of carrying out what one believes to be an absurd
operation while correcting its absurdity, even though it involve one's
own death. When in my bureaucratic capacity I have come across some
legislative ordinance that has fallen into desuetude because of its
manifest absurdity, I have always endeavoured to apply it. There is
nothing worse than a loaded pistol which nobody uses left lying in some
corner of the house; a child finds it, begins to play with it, and kills
its own father. Laws that have fallen into desuetude are the most
terrible of all laws, when the cause of the desuetude is the badness of
the law.

And these are not groundless suppositions, and least of all in our
country. For there are many who, while they go about looking out for I
know not what ideal--that is to say, fictitious duties and
responsibilities--neglect the duty of putting their whole soul into the
immediate and concrete business which furnishes them with a living; and
the rest, the immense majority, perform their task perfunctorily, merely
for the sake of nominally complying with their duty--_para cumplir_, a
terribly immoral phrase--in order to get themselves out of a difficulty,
to get the job done, to qualify for their wages without earning them,
whether these wages be pecuniary or otherwise.

Here you have a shoemaker who lives by making shoes, and makes them with
just enough care and attention to keep his clientele together without
losing custom. Another shoemaker lives on a somewhat higher spiritual
plane, for he has a proper love for his work, and out of pride or a
sense of honour strives for the reputation of being the best shoemaker
in the town or in the kingdom, even though this reputation brings him no
increase of custom or profit, but only renown and prestige. But there is
a still higher degree of moral perfection in this business of
shoemaking