He is an old soldier.
He chews tobacco constantly, and untidily, for his gray beard and moustache are stained yellow.
He is a widower, with fourteen living children, all married, and is the grandfather of thirty-one living grandchildren, and the great-grandfather of four younglings, all girls.
It was like pulling teeth to extract such information.
He is a queer old codger, of a low order of intelligence.
That is why, I fancy, he has lived so long and fathered so numerous a progeny.
His mind must have crystallized thirty years ago. His ideas are none of them later than that vintage.
He rarely says more than yes and no to me.
It is not because he is surly. He has no ideas to utter. I don’t know, when I live again, but what one incarnation such as his would be a nice vegetative existence in which to rest up ere I go star-roving again. . . .
But to go back.
I must take a line in which to tell, after I was hustled and bustled, kicked and punched, up that terrible stairway by Thurston and the rest of the prison-dogs, of the infinite relief of my narrow cell when I found myself back in solitary.
It was all so safe, so secure.
I felt like a lost child returned home again.
I loved those very walls that I had so hated for five years.
All that kept the vastness of space, like a monster, from pouncing upon me were those good stout walls of mine, close to hand on every side.
Agoraphobia is a terrible affliction.
I have had little opportunity to experience it, but from that little I can only conclude that hanging is a far easier matter. . . .
I have just had a hearty laugh.
The prison doctor, a likable chap, has just been in to have a yarn with me, incidentally to proffer me his good offices in the matter of dope.
Of course I declined his proposition to “shoot me” so full of morphine through the night that to-morrow I would not know, when I marched to the gallows, whether I was “coming or going.”
But the laugh.
It was just like Jake Oppenheimer.
I can see the lean keenness of the man as he strung the reporters with his deliberate bull which they thought involuntary.
It seems, his last morning, breakfast finished, incased in the shirt without a collar, that the reporters, assembled for his last word in his cell, asked him for his views on capital punishment.
—Who says we have more than the slightest veneer of civilization coated over our raw savagery when a group of living men can ask such a question of a man about to die and whom they are to see die?
But Jake was ever game.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I hope to live to see the day when capital punishment is abolished.”
I have lived many lives through the long ages.
Man, the individual, has made no moral progress in the past ten thousand years.
I affirm this absolutely.
The difference between an unbroken colt and the patient draught-horse is purely a difference of training.
Training is the only moral difference between the man of to-day and the man of ten thousand years ago.
Under his thin skin of morality which he has had polished onto him, he is the same savage that he was ten thousand years ago.
Morality is a social fund, an accretion through the painful ages.
The new-born child will become a savage unless it is trained, polished, by the abstract morality that has been so long accumulating.
“Thou shalt not kill”—piffle!
They are going to kill me to-morrow morning.
“Thou shalt not kill”—piffle!
In the shipyards of all civilized countries they are laying to-day the keels of Dreadnoughts and of Superdreadnoughts.
Dear friends, I who am about to die, salute you with—“Piffle!”
I ask you, what finer morality is preached to-day than was preached by Christ, by Buddha, by Socrates and Plato, by Confucius and whoever was the author of the “Mahabharata”?
Good Lord, fifty thousand years ago, in our totem-families, our women were cleaner, our family and group relations more rigidly right.
I must say that the morality we practised in those old days was a finer morality than is practised to-day.
Don’t dismiss this thought hastily.
Think of our child labour, of our police graft and our political corruption, of our food adulteration and of our slavery of the daughters of the poor.
When I was a Son of the Mountain and a Son of the Bull, prostitution had no meaning.
We were clean, I tell you.
We did not dream such depths of depravity.
Yea, so are all the lesser animals of to-day clean.
It required man, with his imagination, aided by his mastery of matter, to invent the deadly sins.