“Why, then,” responded the Reverend Bronson with a smile, “if I were you, I should help mankind for the good it gave me, without once thinking on the object of my generosity.”
“But,” returned Morton, “I take no personal joy from helping people. Gad! it wearies me. Man is such a perverse beggar; he's ever wrong end to in his affairs. The entire race is like a horse turned round in its stall, and with its tail in the fodder stands shouting for hay. If men, in what you call their troubles, would but face the other way about, nine times in ten they'd be all right. They wouldn't need help—really!”
“And if what you say be true,” observed the Reverend Bronson, who was as fond of argument as was Morton, “then you have outlined your duty. You say folk are turned wrong in their affairs. Then you should help them to turn right.”
“Really now,” said Morton, imitating concern, “I wouldn't for the world have such sentiments escape to the ears of my club, don't y' know, for it's beastly bad form to even entertain them, but I lay the trouble you seek to relieve, old chap, to that humbug we call civilization; I do, 'pon my word!”
“Do you cry out against civilization?”
“Gad! why not? I say it is an artifice, a mere deceit. Take ourselves: what has it done for any of us? Here is our friend”—Morton dropped his hand upon my shoulder—“who, taking advantage of what was offered of our civilization, came to be so far victorious as to have the town for his kickball. He was a dictator; his word was law among three millions—really! To-day he has riches, and could pave his grounds with gold. He was these things, and had these things, from the hand of civilization; and now, at the end, he sits in the center of sadness waiting for death. Consider my own case: I, too, at the close of my juice-drained days, am waiting for death; only, unlike our friend, I play the cynic and while I wait I laugh.”
“I was never much to laugh,” I interjected.
“The more strange, too, don't y' know,” continued Morton, “since you are aware of life and the mockery of it, as much as I. I may take it that I came crying into this world, for such I understand to be the beastly practice of the human young. Had I understood the empty jest of it, I should have laughed; I should, really!”
“Now with what do you charge civilization?” asked the Reverend Bronson.
“It has made me rich, and I complain of that. The load of my millions begins to bend my back. A decent, wholesome savagery would have presented no such burdens.”