“And happiness,” assented the Englishman.
“And yet,” commented the lawyer, “I think that most of us will admit that such a society, where life is regarded as sacred because it is valuable to the individual, not because it is valuable to the state, tends to the non-production of heroes.”
“That the average will be higher and the exception lower,” observed the journalist. “In other words, that there will be a general elevation of the mass, accompanied by a corresponding lowering of the few.”
“On the whole, I think our system does very well,” said the Englishman, carefully measuring the horseradish. “A mean between two extremes is apt to be satisfactory in results. If we don’t produce a Marcus Aurelius or a Seneca, neither do we produce a Nero or a Phocas. We may have lost patriotism, but we have gained humanity, which is better. If we have lost chivalry, we have acquired decency; and if we have ceased to be picturesque, we have become cleanly, which is considerably more to be desired.”
“I have never felt the romanticism of the Middle Ages,” remarked the girl in black. “When I read of the glories of the Crusaders, I can’t help remembering that a knight wore a single garment for a lifetime, and hacked his horse to pieces for a whim. Just as I never think of that chivalrous brute, Richard the Lion-Hearted, that I don’t see him chopping off the heads of his prisoners.”
“Oh, I don’t think that any of us are sighing for a revival of the Middle Ages,” returned the journalist. “The worship of the past has for its devotees people who have known only the present.”
“Which is as it should be,” commented the lawyer. “If man were confined to the worship of the knowable, all the world would lapse into atheism.”
“Just as the great lovers of humanity were generally hermits,” added the girl in black. “I had an uncle who used to say that he never really loved mankind until he went to live in the wilderness.”
“I think we are drifting from the point,” said the alienist. “Was it not: Can the saving of a human life ever prove to be an immoral act? I once held that it could.”
“Did you act upon the theory?” asked the lawyer, with rising interest. “I maintain that no proposition can be said to exist until it is translated into action. Otherwise it is in an embryonic state merely.”