“I did. Out of no regard for Garland, with no desire to save his life, but merely in the interests of the community as a whole.”
“Allow me to put this question.” Hartz’s senses were now strung to the point of intensity. “Had Garland followed the course you suggested to him, do you suppose he would have been alive to-day?”
“I think it highly probable.”
“Yet in your view he was a bad man?”
“Had he taken the advice I gave him, he would have been impotent to do further mischief. But who does take advice?”
“Then why give it?”
“He came to me and sought it. I was enormously interested in his case. He was one of the most remarkable men I ever met. A creature of rare courage, energy, force of will, he aspired to the kind of dictatorship over his fellow men which seems to have such a fascination for half educated minds.”
“You would rate such a man as Garland among the half educated?”
“Among the rather less than half educated. At best his power lay among the turbulent, seething proletariats of the western world which enjoy political power without having to pay for it, among the shiftless herds which are out to grab the goods and chattels of their more fortunate or more deserving neighbors.”
“In other words, his aim was to set class against class, so that he might ride to power on the storm he had raised.”