he dies. That is the law. Cut the head off a lie, it
does not die at all. It rather seems to enjoy the operation. You will
meet it, like fifty St. Denises, on every morning walk, during your
lifetime. They have a marvellous vitality. I meet lies every day that,
to my certain knowledge, were put to death a hundred years ago, by
master hands at the business, too. They ought, in decency at least, to
look like pale ghosts 'revisiting the glimpses of the moon,' but they
don't. They are smug, comfortable, and somewhat portly, as from good,
solid living.

Now this is discouraging somewhat. But there is no good in shutting
one's eyes to the fact. That is what I am going against. It is best to
know that lies die hard. They will bear at least as many killings as a
cat, and that's _nine_. Still, much depends upon the manner of the
operation. How is it best performed? Knowledge is needed in all
pursuits. There is a science undoubtedly in killing lies. If you wish to
go into the business, and I trust most honest men do, you need to study
it somewhat. Otherwise you will waste much effort, and get few results.
It is not easy to kill one wolf with a stick, but, call science to your
aid, and an ounce of strychnine, well administered, will do the business
for a pack. Instead of going into a rough-and-tumble fight with some
coarse, rude, vile lie, and mauling it to death by sheer force of
muscle, it is better to use science and put it to death neatly, cleanly,
and delicately, with unsoiled hands. Let us see if we can find the
science of killing lies.

'The greater the lie the greater the truth.' Take that with you. A lie
must, somewhere, have a truth to prop it. In the heart of every big
successful lie you will find some reality. Of course you cannot build a
house on _nothing_. A pyramid cannot be constructed in the air. Now a
lie is _nothing_, the very definition of nothing. It is what _is not_.
So, of course, no pure and simple lie exists. It always builds itself on
some truth. It always roots itself into some fact. And there is the
secret of its vitality. You batter the lie with your logic, but the
blows rebound from the iron truth beneath. You assail it with the
flashing darts of your rhetoric, the points fly harmless from the marble
reality below. There is truth there somewhere. That is why your rhetoric
and your logic fail. That, too, is why one so often sees that most
bewildering and despairing sight, men clinging to a lie, honori