y, in
prisons where they are still occasionally put to death? I am refused,
rebuffed, gratuitously reprimanded; in fact, I am driven ultimately to the
extreme course of taking human life, on my own account, in order to prove
the life eternal. Call it murder, call it what you will; in a
civilisation which will not hear of a lethal chamber for congenital
imbeciles it would be waste of time to urge the inutility of a life as an
excuse for taking it, or the misery of an individual as a reason for
sending him to a world which cannot use him worse than this world. I can
only say that I have not deprived the State of one conceivably profitable
servant, or cut short a single life of promise or repute. I have picked
my few victims with infinite care from amid the moral or material wreckage
of life; either they had nothing to live for, or they had no right to
live. Charlton, the licensed messenger, had less to live for than any man
I ever knew; in the course of our brief acquaintance he frequently told me
how he wished he was dead. I came across him in Kensington, outside a
house to which an unseemly fracas had attracted my attention as I passed.
Charlton had just been ejected for being drunk and insolent, and refusing
to leave without an extra sixpence. I befriended him. He was indeed
saturated with alcohol and honeycombed with disease; repulsive in
appearance, and cantankerous in character, his earnings were so slender
that he was pitifully clad, and without a night's lodging oftener than
not. He had not a friend in the world, and was suffering from an
incurable malady of which the end was certain agony. I resolved to put
him out of his misery, and at the same time to try to photograph the
escape of his soul. A favourable opportunity did not present itself for
some time, during which Charlton subsisted largely on my bounty; at last
one morning I found him asleep on a bench in Holland Walk, and not another
being in sight, and I shot him with a cheap pistol which I had purchased
second-hand for the purpose, and which I left beside him on the seat. Yet
the weapon it was that cast a doubt upon the authenticity of the suicide,
despite my final precaution of stuffing a number of cartridges into the
dead man's pocket; pot-house associates came forward to declare that he
could never have possessed either the revolver or its price without their
knowledge. Hence the coroner's repudiation of the verdict at the inquest.
Yet it i