All good and bad then he has
in his flask, and on these he can expend his whole power of liking or
repulsion; witness the fact that to millions of excellent people the
condemnation of Dreyfus, or the sinking of the "Lusitania," remains
the crime of the century. They cannot see that the path of social
life is paved with crime, and that they walk over it in perfect
unconsciousness, profiting by injustices that they make no effort to
prevent. Of all these, which are the worst? Those which rouse long
echoes in the conscience of mankind, or those which are known alone to
the stifled victim? Naturally, our worthy friends have not arms long
enough to embrace all the misery of the world; they can only reach one
perhaps, but that they press close to their heart; and when they have
chosen a crime, they pour out upon it all the pent-up hatred within
them;--when a dog has a bone to gnaw, it is wiser not to touch him.
Clerambault had tried to take his bone away from the dog, and if he
was bitten he had no right to complain; in point of fact he did not
do so. Men are in the right to fight injustice wherever they see it;
perhaps it is not their fault if they often see no more than its big
toe, like Gulliver's at Brobdignag. Well, we must each do what we can;
and these people could bite.
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