later you will have your liberty! Here's why I let you live!"

Basilio breathed freely, as though a great weight had been lifted from
him, and after a brief pause, replied: "Sir, the honor you do me in
confiding your plans to me is too great for me not to be frank with
you, and tell you that what you ask of me is beyond my power. I am
no politician, and if I have signed the petition for instruction in
Castilian it has been because I saw in it an advantage to our studies
and nothing more. My destiny is different; my aspiration reduces
itself to alleviating the physical sufferings of my fellow men."

The jeweler smiled. "What are physical sufferings compared to moral
tortures? What is the death of a man in the presence of the death of a
society? Some day you will perhaps be a great physician, if they let
you go your way in peace, but greater yet will be he who can inject
a new idea into this anemic people! You, what are you doing for the
land that gave you existence, that supports your life, that affords
you knowledge? Don't you realize that that is a useless life which is
not consecrated to a great idea? It is a stone wasted in the fields
without becoming a part of any edifice."

"No, no, sir!" replied Basilio modestly, "I'm not folding my arms,
I'm working like all the rest to raise up from the ruins of the past
a people whose units will be bound together--that each one may feel
in himself the conscience and the life of the whole. But however
enthusiastic our generation may be, we understand that in this great
social fabric there must be a division of labor. I have chosen my
task and will devote myself to science."

"Science is not the end of man," declared Simoun.