"But how," I persisted, "could the relatives allow Madame to forgive him?"
"Well, Madame insisted that he was not mentally responsible,--that he was only a poor fool who had killed without knowing what he was doing; and she argued that if _she_ could forgive him, others could more easily do the same. There was a consultation; and the relatives decided so to arrange matters that Madame could have her own way."
"Because they knew that she found a sort of religious consolation--a kind of religious comfort--in forgiving the wretch. She imagined that it was her duty as a Christian, not only to forgive him, but to take care of him. We thought that she was mistaken,--but we could understand.... Well, there is an example of what religion can do."...
The surprise of a new fact, or the sudden perception of something never before imagined, may cause an involuntary smile. Unconsciously I smiled, while my friend was yet speaking; and the good notary's brow darkened.
"Ah, you laugh!" he exclaimed,--"you laugh! That is wrong!--that is a mistake!... But you do not believe: you do not know what it is,--the true religion,--the real Christianity!"
"Pardon me! I do believe every word of what you have told me. If I laughed unthinkingly, it was only because I could not help wondering" ...
"At the marvelous instinct of that negro."
"Ah, yes!" he returned approvingly. "Yes, the cunning of the animal it was,--the instinct of the brute!... She was the only person in the world who could have saved him."
"No--no--no!" my friend emphatically dissented,--"he never could have known it! He only _felt_ it!... Find me an instinct like that, and I will show you a brain incapable of any knowledge, any thinking, any understanding: not the mind of a man, but the brain of a beast!"
Here, in this quiet suburb, where the green peace is broken only by the voices of children at play and the shrilling of cicadæ, it is difficult to imagine that, a few hundred miles away, there is being carried on one of the most tremendous wars of modern times, between armies aggregating more than half a million of men, or that, on the intervening sea, a hundred ships of war have been battling. This contest, between the mightiest of Western powers and a people that began to study Western science only within the recollection of many persons still in vigorous life, is, on one side at least, a struggle for national existence. It was inevitable, this struggle,--might perhaps have been delayed, but certainly not averted. Japan has boldly challenged an empire capable of threatening simultaneously the civilizations of the East and the West,--a mediæval power that, unless vigorously checked, seems destined to absorb Scandinavia and to dominate China. For all industrial civilization the contest is one of vast moment;--for Japan it is probably the supreme crisis in her national life. As to what her fleets and her armies have been doing, the world is fully informed; but as to what her people are doing at home, little has been written.