arpen your wits and fill your pocket And so, in general, with all
professions and occupations; whichever you may adopt, you will treat
it merely as a means to your own Good; and since you have no Good
which is also common to other men, you will use these others without
scruple to further what you conceive to be your own advantage, without
necessarily paying any regard to what they may conceive to be theirs."

"Well," he said, "and why not?"

"I don't ask 'why not'?" I replied, "I ask merely whether it would be
so? whether you do, as a matter of fact, conceive it possible that you
should ever adopt such an attitude?"

"Well, no," he admitted, "I don't think it is; but that is an
idiosyncrasy of mine; and I have no doubt there are plenty of other
men who are precisely in the position you describe. Take, for example,
a man like the late Jay Gould. Do you suppose that he, in his business
operations, ever had any regard for anything except his own personal
advantage? Do you suppose he cared how many people he ruined? Do you
suppose he cared even whether he ruined his country, except so far as
such ruin might interfere with his own profit? Or look again at the
famous Mr. Leiter of Chicago! What do you suppose it mattered to
him that he might be starving half the world, and imperilling the
governments of Europe? It was enough for him that he should realize a
fortune; of all the rest, I suppose, he washed his hands. He and men
like him adopt, I have no doubt, precisely the position which you are
trying to show is impossible."

"No," I said, "I am not trying to show that it is impossible in
general; I am only trying to show that it is impossible for you. And
my object is to suggest that if a man does deny a general Good, he
denies it, as I say, at his peril. If his denial is genuine, and
not merely verbal, it will lead him to conduct of the kind I have
described."

"But surely," interrupted Leslie, "you have no right to assume that a
disbelief in a general Good, however genuine, necessarily involves
a sheer egoism in conduct? For a man might find that his own Good
consisted in furthering the Good of other people; and in that case of
course he will try to further it."

"But," I replied, "on our hypothesis there is no Good of other people.
Each individual, we agreed, has his Good, but there is no Good common
to all. And thus we could have no guarantee that in furthering the
Good of one we are also furthering that of others.