Mr. Y. You are afraid of being discovered.
Mr. X. Perhaps that’s it. But don’t you think that a man of my intelligence ought to be able to work it so that he’s not discovered? I just went alone—without witnesses—rummaged about there beyond the hills. Would there be anything strange in my filling my pockets a bit?
Mr. Y. Quite so, but selling would probably be particularly risky.
Mr. X. Ah! ah! I should of course melt it all down and coin good golden ducats —full weight, of course.
Mr. Y. Of course.
Mr. X. You can quite understand that, if I were running a false mint, well, there’d be no need for me to dig up my gold. [Pause.] It’s remarkable, at all events, if another person were to do this, which I can’t reconcile myself to, why I should absolve him, but I can’t absolve myself. I could make a brilliant defence of the thief, prove that gold was res nullius, or nobody’s, that it came into the earth at a time when there was no such thing as property, that it shouldn’t by right belong to anybody else except the first-comer, since the contents of the earth existed a long time before landowners made their artificial laws of real property.
Mr. Y. And you would make your case all the more plausible if, as you say, the thief did not steal from want, but as a matter of collecting mania, as a matter of pure scholarship, because of his ambition to make a discovery. Isn’t that so?
Mr. X. You mean that I shouldn’t get him off if he had stolen out of want? No, that’s just the one case for which there is no excuse. That’s pure theft.
Mr. Y. And wouldn’t you excuse that?
Mr. X. How? Excuse? I couldn’t, for there are no excuses in law. But I must confess that I should find it hard to prosecute a collector for theft, because he made an archaeological discovery in somebody else’s ground which he didn’t have in his own collection.