because they are made up of ones and others? Do you or I need
threats and promises to make us kind? And what right have we to
judge others worse than ourselves? Mutual compassion," he went on,
blowing out a mouthful of smoke and then swelling his big chest with
a huge lungsful of air, "might be sufficient to teach poor
ephemerals kindness and consideration enough to last their time."

"But how would you bring such reflections to bear?" asked Helen,
pertinently.

"I would reason thus: You must consider that you are but a part of
the whole, and that whatever you do to hurt the whole, or injure any
of its parts, will return upon you who form one of those parts."

"How would that influence the man whose favourite amusement is to
beat his wife!"

"Not at all, I grant you. But that man is what he is from being born
and bred under a false and brutal system. Having deluged his
delicate brain with the poisonous fumes of adulterated liquor, and
so roused all the terrors of a phantom-haunted imagination, he sees
hostile powers above watching for his fall, and fiery ruin beneath
gaping to receive him, and in pure despair acts like the madman the
priests and the publicans have made him. Helen," continued Bascombe
with solemnity, regarding her fixedly, "to deliver the race from the
horrors of such falsehoods, which by no means operate only on the
vulgar and brutal, for to how many of the most refined and delicate of
human beings are not their lives rendered bitter by the evil suggestions
of lying systems--I care not what they are called--philosophy,
religion, society, I care not?--to deliver men, I say, from such