Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/168

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often supremely good when circumstance forces them to live and work amongst either inferior peoples, as in Africa, or a people of a different civilization and culture, as in Asia.

Perhaps it is because they feel that, amongst foreign races, it is up to them to uphold the traditions of their own country; perhaps there is at the back of it some scientific or quasi-scientific reason not yet discovered, dissected, and codified ad absurdum by those enthusiastically illogical and intolerant atheists who call themselves biologists.

But the fact of it remains; and Hector Wade was a living example.

Quite untrammeled by the clogging traditions of Tamerlanistan's past, yet careful not to rough-ride over any of those customs and prejudices which, in the swing of the centuries, had become endowed with an almost religious sanction, he gripped the helm of the ship of state and proceeded to navigate it amongst the swirls and shoals and eddies of the turbulent political waters.

Soberly English, he began with the department of the treasury. English, too, in his willingness to compromise instead of dragooning, he retransferred the treasury to the capable hands of Gulabian, whom he released from prison. English, finally, in his constructive though rather cynical belief that the best preventive against corruption is money, he raised the Armenian's salary to such a high figure that it would not have paid him to accept bribes. The result was as he had expected: Gulabian became a faithful supporter