with all the authority possessed by the
Regents under me, and by the laws which you think best suited to races
very different from our own. You shall be there as great and absolute
as I am here, paying only an obedience to me and my successors which,
at so immense a distance, can be little more than formal."

"Is it to acquire a merely formal power that a Prince like yourself
would risk the lives of your own people, and sacrifice those of
millions of another race?"

"To tell you the truth," he replied, "I count on commanding the
expedition myself; and perhaps I care more for the adventure than for
its fruits. You will not expect me to be more chary of the lives of
others than of my own?"

"I understand, and as a soldier could share, perhaps, a feeling
natural to a great, a capable, and an ambitious Prince. But alike as
soldier and subject it is my duty to resist, not to aid, such an
ambition. My life is at your disposal, but even to save my life I
could not betray the lives of hundreds of millions and the future of a
whole world."

"I fail to understand you fully," he said, abandoning with a sigh a
hope that had evidently been the object of long and eager day-dreams.
"But in no case would I try to force from you what you will not give
or sell; and if you speak sincerely--and I suppose you must do so,
since I can see no motive but those you assign that could induce you
to refuse my offer--I must believe in the existence of what I have
heard of now and then but deemed incredible--men who are governed by
care for other things than their own interests, who believe in right
and wrong, and would rather suffer injustice than commit it."

"You may be sure, Prince," I replied, perhaps imprudently, "that there
are such men in your own world, though they are perhaps among those
who are least known and least likely to be seen at your Court."

"If you know them," he said, "you will render me no little service in
bringing them to my knowledge."

"It is possible," I ventured to observe, "that their distinguishing
excellences are connected with other distinctions which might render
it a disservice to them to indicate their peculiar character, I will
not say to yourself, but to those around you."

"I hardly understand you," he rejoined. "Take, however, my assurance
that nothing you say here shall, without your own consent, be used
elsewhere. It is no light gratification, no trifling advantage to me,
to find one man who has nei