The Patient Observer and His Friends

ld become of my moral standards. Whenever my sense of right and wrong grows blunted; whenever the inextricable confusion of good and bad in everything about us becom

ately supplanted the encyclop?dia and General Kuropatkin's illustrated memoirs of the Russo-Japanese War, in Bob's affections. Who, he wanted to know, was the swarthy, lean, hook-nosed gentleman in a tasselled cap, who stood up in

atred for tyranny and oppression, and a love for the principles of representative government; and on the whole I am inclined to think Harrington did right. In any case Harrington told the boy that the bad Sultan was in the habit of sending his soldiers to shoot people, and burn down their homes, and take away everything they had to eat, and put all the wome

tan did to the little children. What else? Harrington's criminal imagination

t fair to the late Commander of the Faithful to charge his name with a crime he was probably innocent of? But then again, if that particular crime was necessary to the lesson borne in on Bob, why hesitate? So Harrington ponders a moment and decides; yes, even to that level of iniquity had Abdul Hamid II sunk. The atomiser was one of the ins

unch him, like this," and his fist, shooting out

aid he will hurt yo

Bob; "I'l

rough the fat, red volume with the star and crescent on the cover; and every time the Sultan's face appears in the pictures, the boy smit

Of the Sultan driving to the Selamlik every Friday there is visible now only one of the carriage horses and the fragments of a cavalryman. Nor is the physical presentment of Abdul Hamid the only th

en to the guillotine, and tomahawk the Puritan settlers as they worked in the fields. He has made him responsible for St. Bartholomew's Day, and Andersonville prison. He has robbed the Czar of his just credit by making Abdul Hamid the

ou choose to look at it. In Bob's world there are good things and bad things, and the good is good and the bad is bad. Bob knows nothing of the cant which makes the robber monopolist only the sad victim of forces outside his control. Bob knows nothing of the sentimen

ton had worked himself up to an extraordinary pitch of excitement. Never had that despot been painted in such horrid colours; and after he had told how the palace guards rose against the Constitution, and how the Young Turks marched upon Constantinople, and how the craven tyrant, crying "Don't hurt me, don

uch thing as a good Sultan; that they are as a rule cruel and immoral, and always expensive; and that at best they are harmless, if somewhat stupid, survivals. But since the very idea of a bad Sultan demands a good one, Harrington tried to satisfy Bob by investing Mohammed V with a large number of negative virtues. "A good Sultan does not shoot people, or burn down house

hades in what is black or dark spots in the white. Bob holds, for instance, that bad soldiers shoot down good people, and that good soldiers shoot down bad people. He is quite as close to the truth as I am, who believe that there is no such thing as a good soldier and that the business of shooting down people, whether g