backwards?  Away then with effeminate scruples!  Fulfill the eternal laws, foster them, and then the earth will be so much the more fecund the more it is fertilized with blood, and the thrones the more solid the more they rest upon crimes and corpses.  Let there be no hesitation, no doubtings!  What is the pain of death?  A momentary sensation, perhaps confused, perhaps agreeable, like the transition from waking to sleep.  What is it that is being destroyed?  Evil, suffering—­feeble weeds, in order to set in their place luxuriant plants.  Do you call that destruction?  I should call it creating, producing, nourishing, vivifying!”

Such bloody sophisms, uttered with conviction and coolness, overwhelmed the youth, weakened as he was by more than three months in prison and blinded by his passion for revenge, so he was not in a mood to analyze the moral basis of the matter.  Instead of replying that the worst and cowardliest of men is always something more than a plant, because he has a soul and an intelligence, which, however vitiated and brutalized they may be, can be redeemed; instead of replying that man has no right to dispose of one life for the benefit of another, that the right to life is inherent in every individual like the right to liberty and to light; instead of replying that if it is an abuse on the part of governments to punish in a culprit the faults and crimes to which they have driven him by their own negligence or stupidity, how much more so would it be in a man, however great and however unfortunate he might be, to punish in a wretched people the faults of its governments and its ancestors; instead of declaring that God alone can use such methods, that God can destroy because He can create, God who holds in His hands recompense, eternity, and the future, to justify His acts, and man never; instead of these reflections, Basilio merely interposed a cant reflection.

“What will the world say at the sight of such butchery?”

“The world will applaud, as usual, conceding the right of the strongest, the most violent!” replied Simoun with his cruel smile.  “Europe applauded when the western nations sacrificed millions of Indians in America, and not by any means to found nations much more moral or more pacific:  there is the North with its egotistic liberty, its lynch-law, its political frauds—­the South with its turbulent republics, its barbarous revolutions, civil wars, pronunciamientos, as in its mother Spain!  Europe applauded when the powerful Portugal despoiled the Moluccas, it applauds while England is destroying the primitive races in the Pacific to make room for its emigrants.  Europe will applaud as the end of a drama, the close of a tragedy, is applauded, for the vulgar do not fix their attention on principles, they look only at results.  Commit the crime well, and you will be admired and have more partizans than if you had carried out virtuous actions with modesty and timidity.”

“Exactly,” rejoined the youth, “what does it matter to me, after all, whether they praise or censure, when this world takes no care of the oppressed, of the poor, and of weak womankind?  What obligations have I to recognize toward society when it has recognized none toward me?”