people? We mustn't pamper their egotism
in chastising our own. We must use a great deal of caution in doing our
duty. If I really loved that squirrel, if I were truly kind to animals,
if I studied their best good, as disagreeable friends say they study
ours, I should go after him and give him a hickory-nut that would wear
down his teeth as nature intended; civilization is undermining the
health of squirrels by feeding them peanuts, which allow their teeth to
overgrow."

"That is true. Isn't it doing something of the same sort in other ways
for all of us? If I hadn't lost my teeth so long ago, I'm sure I should
feel them piercing from one jaw to another in their inordinate
development. It's duty that keeps down the overgrowths that luxury
incites. By-the-way, what set you thinking so severely about duty this
beautiful Sunday morning? The neglected duty of going to church?"

"Ah, I call going to church a pleasure. No, I suppose it was an effect,
a reverberation, of the tumult of my struggle to vote for the right man
on Tuesday, when I knew that I was throwing my vote away if I did vote
for him."

"But you voted for him?"

The first friend nodded.

"Which man was it?"

"What's the use? He was beaten--

'That is all you know or need to know.'"

"Of course he was beaten if it was your duty to vote for him," the
second friend mused. "How patient the Creator must be with the result of
His counsel to His creatures! He keeps on communing, commanding, if we
are to believe Kant. It is His one certain way to affirm and corroborate
Himself. Without His perpetual message to the human conscience, He does
not recognizably exist; and yet more than half the time His mandate
sends us to certain defeat, to certain death. It's enough to make one go
in for the other side. Of course, we have to suppose that the same voice
which intimates duty to us intimates duty to them?"

"And that they would like to obey it, if they could consistently with
other interests and obligations?"

"Yes, they juggle with their sense of it; they pretend that the Voice
does not mean exactly what it says. They get out of it that way."

"And the great, vital difference between ourselves and them is that we
promptly and explicitly obey it; we don't palter with it in the
slightest; 'we don't bandy words with our sovereign,' as Doctor Johnson
said. I wonder," the speaker added, with the briskness of one to whom a
vivid thought suddenly occurs, "how it w