ed myself to
the idea of a sojourn there for the remainder of my days.

But I had already perceived unmistakable evidences of the blighting
effect which was being steadily produced upon certain members of the
community by the consciousness--which I think some of them were only now
beginning to fully realise--that industry and individual effort were to
count for nothing, and that the lazy, useless units were to live a life
of inglorious ease at the expense of the hard workers. I foresaw that a
time was coming when deadly strife would rage between the two sections;
and the prospect was not enticing enough to induce me to throw in my lot
with the rest. Yet, if I did not, my life would be in danger; for it
scarcely needed Gurney's communication of an hour before to impress upon
me the conviction that, sooner or later, Wilde and his followers would
insist upon my giving in my adhesion to them or--taking the consequences
of refusal. And it did not need the gift of the seer to forecast the
precise character of those consequences. I had scouted the idea of
deliberate cold-blooded murder when Gurney had suggested it to me, yet I
had not forgotten that I had already been threatened with death as the
alternative to undertaking the navigation of the ship, during the quest
for a suitable island upon which to settle; and I had very little doubt
that they would have carried out their threat had I persisted in my
refusal.

Now I was again threatened with it. There seemed to be but two
alternatives--submission or flight; and it was but the work of a moment
with me to decide that flight was the more acceptable of the two. But
how to accomplish it? I thought of the longboat; but to fit her for a
long voyage in the open ocean, with any hope of accomplishing it, would
need an amount of preparation that could not possibly escape notice.
And to be detected in the making of such preparations would be to arouse
such suspicion as must inevitably result in the complete defeat of my
plans, followed perhaps by other consequences of a still more serious
character; while to neglect them and attempt flight in the boat, just as
she was, would be madness--an expedient only to be resorted to under
stress of the direst extremity. Hour after hour I sat there racking my
brains in quest of some practicable plan offering a reasonable prospect
of success; but could think of nothing; the scheme upon which I finally
settled being only one degree less ma