with enemies.  “Do not,” he says, “show your wounded finger, for everything will knock up against it; nor complain about it, for malice always aims where weakness can be injured....  Never disclose the source of mortification or of joy, if you wish the one to cease, the other to endure.”  About secrets the Spaniard is quite as cautious as the Norseman.  He says, “Especially dangerous are secrets entrusted to friends.  He that communicates his secret to another makes himself that other man’s slave.”  But after a great many such cautions in regard to silence and secrecy, he tells us also that we must learn how to fight with the world.  You remember the advice of the “Havamal” on this subject, how it condemns as a fool the man who can not answer a reproach.  The Spaniard is, however, much more malicious in his suggestions.  He tells as that we must “learn to know every man’s thumbscrew.”  I suppose you know that a thumbscrew was an instrument of torture used in old times to force confessions from criminals.  This advice means nothing less than that we should learn how to be be able to hurt other men’s feelings, or to flatter other men’s weaknesses.  “First guess every man’s ruling passion, appeal to it by a word, set it in motion by temptation, and you will infallibly give checkmate to his freedom of will.”  The term “give checkmate” is taken from the game of chess, and must here be understood as meaning to overcome, to conquer.  A kindred piece of advice is “keep a store of sarcasms, and know how to use them.”  Indeed he tells us that this is the point of greatest tact in human intercourse.  “Struck by the slightest word of this kind, many fall away from the closest intimacy with superiors or inferiors, which intimacy could not be in the slightest shaken by a whole conspiracy of popular insinuation or private malevolence.”  In other words, you can more quickly destroy a man’s friendship by one word of sarcasm than by any amount of intrigue.  Does not this read very much like sheer wickedness?  Certainly it does; but the author would have told you that you must fight the wicked with their own weapons.  In the “Havamal” you will not find anything quite so openly wicked as that; but we must suppose that the Norsemen knew the secret, though they might not have put it into words.  As for the social teaching, you will find it very subtly expressed even in the modern English novels of George Meredith, who, by the way, has written a poem in praise of sarcasm and ridicule.  But let us now see what the Spanish author has to tell us about friendship and unselfishness.

The shrewd man knows that others when they seek him do not seek “him,” but “their advantage in him and by him.”  That is to say, a shrewd man does not believe in disinterested friendship.  This is much worse than anything in the “Havamal.”  And it is diabolically elaborated.  What are we to say about such teaching as the following:  “A wise man would rather see men needing him than thanking him.  To keep them on the threshold