'And so you persuaded yourself in favour of the virtual sacrifice? Oh!'—he burst out, laughing drily—'the modern Annas talks just the reverse of the old one. Culture has taught him that it is better a nation should perish than that one alleged great man should be brought to nought. It was some such rotten gospel of reaction that Thomas Carlyle, the Scots peasant, who ratted on his order like many another parvenu, commercial or philosophic, furbished up, here in England, in the interests of his aristocrat patrons, under the Brummagem shape of what he denominates hero-worship—damn him!'
Daniel laughed in turn, but almost to himself, at his friend's savage outburst.
'A devout person,' he said, 'was confidentially telling me the other day that he was quite sure Thomas was eternally damned already. However, you are mistaken as to my powers of self-persuasion in this matter. The great god Expediency did not win my worship on that point. I had the contrary idea. It seemed to me that the danger of the ruin of humanity lay far more clearly in the other direction. No, my friend, I concluded altogether in favour of the attempt to abolish the sacrifice. Moloch, even in his latest revised and amended shape, seems to me somewhat out of date.'
Hastings answered nothing, merely raising his
