nd I
will answer for it when we stand face to face at the Bar where all
secrets are laid bare. The man deserved death, for he was plotting
the death of thousands. What matter then how or by whose hands he
died?

"It is time the world had done with these miserable sophistries, and
these spurious distinctions between murder by wholesale and by
retail, and it soon will have done with them. I, by your hand, killed
Dornovitch in his sleep. That was murder, says the legal casuist. You
read this morning in the _Times_ how one of the Russian war-balloons
went the night before last and hung in the darkness over a sleeping
town on the Austrian frontier, and dropped dynamite shells upon it,
killing and maiming hundreds who had no personal quarrel with Russia.
That is war, and therefore lawful!

"Nonsense, my friend, nonsense! There is no difference. All violence
is crime, if you will, but it is a question of degree only. The world
is mad on this subject of war. It considers the horrible thing
honourable, and gives its highest distinctions to those who shed
blood most skilfully on the battlefield, and the triumphs that are
won by superior force or cunning are called glorious, and those who
achieve them the nations fall down and worship.

"The nations must be taught wisdom, for war has had victims enough.
But men are still foolish, and to cure them a terrible lesson will be
necessary. But that lesson shall be taught, even though the whole
earth be turned into a battlefield, and all the dwellings of men into
charnel-houses, in order to teach it to them."

"In other words, Society is to be dissolved in order that anarchy and
lawlessness may take its place. Society may not be perfect,--nay, I
will grant that its sins are many and grievous, that it has forgotten
its duty both to God and man in its worship of Mammon and its slavery
to externals,--but you who have plotted its destruction, have you
anything better to put in its place? You can destroy, perhaps, but
can you build up?"

"The jungle must be cleared and the swamp drained before the
habitations of men can be built in their place. It has been mine to
destroy, and I will pursue the work of destruction to the end, as I
have sworn to do by that Name which a Jew holds too sacred for
speech. I believe myself to be the instrument of vengeance upon this
generation, even as Joshua was upon Canaan, and as Khalid the Sword
of God was upon Byzantium in the days of her corruption. You