The Offensive Stranger: Listen to the law: From every impulse, whether good or evil, flow two streams; the one carries health, the other carries poison. From the beginning of time this law has not changed, to the end of time it will not change.
The Dervish: If I should strike thee dead in anger----
The Offensive Stranger: Or kill me with a drug which you hoped would give me new life and strength----
The Dervish: Very well. Go on.
The Offensive Stranger: In either case the results would be the same. Age-long misery of mind for you--an evil result; peace, repose, the end of sorrow for me--a good result. Three hearts that hold me dear would break; three pauper cousins of the third removed would get my riches and rejoice; you would go to prison and your friends would grieve, but your humble apprentice-priest would step into your shoes and your fat sleek life and be happy. And are these all the goods and all the evils that would flow from the well-intended or ill-intended act that cut short my life, O thoughtless one, O purblind creature? The good and evil results that flow from any act, even the smallest, breed on and on, century after century, forever and ever and ever, creeping by inches around the globe, affecting all its coming and going populations until the end of time, until the final cataclysm!
The Dervish: Then, there being no such thing as a good deed----
The Offensive Stranger: Don’t I tell you there are good intentions, and evil ones, and there an end? The results are not foreseeable. They are of both kinds, in all cases. It is the law. Listen: this is far-Western history:
VOICES OUT OF UTAH
I
The White Chief (to his people): This wide plain was a desert. By our Heaven-blest industry we have damned the river and utilized its waters and turned the desert into smiling fields whose fruitage makes prosperous and happy a thousand homes where poverty and hunger dwelt before. How noble, how beneficent, is Civilization!