“Ah, that is very true,” said I, “but you skinned the legs of one thousand.”

“And what of that?” he asked.  “Can one thousand, or ten thousand, or any number of persons suffer more agony than one?  A man may have his leg broken, then his nails pulled out, then be seared with a hot iron.  Here is suffering added to suffering, and the effect is really cumulative.  In the true mathematical sense it is a sum of suffering.  A single person can experience it.  But consider, my dear sir.  How can you add one man’s agony to another’s?  They are not addable quantities.  Each is an individual pain, unaffected by the other.  The limit of anguish which ingenuity can inflict is that utmost pang which one man has the vitality to endure.”

I was convinced but not silenced.

The Golampians all believe, singularly enough, that truth possesses some inherent vitality and power that give it an assured prevalence over falsehood; that a good name cannot be permanently defiled and irreparably ruined by detraction, but, like a star, shines all the brighter for the shadow through which it is seen; that justice cannot be stayed by injustice; that vice is powerless against virtue.  I could quote from their great writers hundreds of utterances affirmative of these propositions.  One of their poets, for example, has some striking and original lines, of which the following is a literal but unmetrical translation: 

  A man who is in the right has three arms,
  But he whose conscience is rotten with wrong
  Is stripped and confined in a metal cell.

Imbued with these beliefs, the Golampis think it hardly worth while to be truthful, to abstain from slander, to do justice and to avoid vicious actions.  “The practice,” they say, “of deceit, calumniation, oppression and immorality cannot have any sensible and lasting injurious effect, and it is most agreeable to the mind and heart.  Why should there be personal self-denial without commensurate general advantage?”

In consequence of these false views, affirmed by those whom they regard as great and wise, the people of Mogon-Zwair are, as far as I have observed them, the most conscienceless liars, cheats, thieves, rakes and all-round, many-sided sinners that ever were created to be damned.  It was, therefore, with inexpressible joy that I received one day legal notification that I had been tried in the High Court of Conviction and sentenced to banishment to Lalugnan.  My offense was that I had said that I regarded consistency as the most detestable of all vices.

AN INTERVIEW WITH GNARMAG-ZOTE