His statement was clear and even restrained,
and such flights of imagery as occurred in it only attracted attention
by a certain indescribable abruptness, not uncommon in the flowers
of American speech.
He planted the points of his ten frail fingers on the mahogany,
closed his eyes, and opened his mouth. "The time has gone by,"
he said, "when murder could be regarded as a moral and individual act,
important perhaps to the murderer, perhaps to the murdered.
Science has profoundly..." here he paused, poising his compressed
finger and thumb in the air as if he were holding an elusive idea
very tight by its tail, then he screwed up his eyes and said
"modified," and let it go--"has profoundly Modified our view of death.
In superstitious ages it was regarded as the termination of life,
catastrophic, and even tragic, and was often surrounded by solemnity.
Brighter days, however, have dawned, and we now see death as universal
and inevitable, as part of that great soul-stirring and heart-upholding
average which we call for convenience the order of nature.
In the same way we have come to consider murder SOCIALLY.
Rising above the mere private feelings of a man while being forcibly
deprived of life, we are privileged to behold murder as a mighty whole,
to see the rich rotation of the cosmos, bringing, as it brings
the golden harvests and the golden-bearded harvesters, the return
for ever of the slayers and the slain.
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