endurance in other physical exercises, which he has attained, by a
strenuous cultivation in this kind that has excluded any similarly
strenuous cultivation in other kinds--will these physical attainments
help him to win a purely moral victory over his own selfishness and his
own cruelty? They won't even help him to see that it _is_ selfishness,
and that it _is_ cruelty. The essential principle of his rowing and
racing (a harmless principle enough, if you can be sure of applying it
to rowing and racing only) has taught him to take every advantage of
another man that his superior strength and superior cunning can suggest.
There has been nothing in his training to soften the barbarous hardness
in his heart, and to enlighten the barbarous darkness in his mind.
Temptation finds this man defenseless, when temptation passes his way.
I don't care who he is, or how high he stands accidentally in the social
scale--he is, to all moral intents and purposes, an Animal, and nothing
more. If my happiness stands in his way--and if he can do it with
impunity to himself--he will trample down my happiness. If my life
happens to be the next obstacle he encounters--and if he can do it with
impunity to himself--he will trample down my life. Not, Mr. Delamayn, in
the character of a victim to irresistible fatality, or to blind chance;
but in the character of a man who has sown the seed, and reaps the
harvest. That, Sir, is the case which I put as an extreme case only,
when this discussion began. As an extreme case only--but as a perfectly
possible case, at the same time--I restate it now."

Before the advocates of the other side of the question could open their
lips to reply, Geoffrey suddenly flung off his indifference, and started
to his feet.

"Stop!" he cried, threatening the others, in his fierce impatience to
answer for himself, with his clenched fist.