Without Prejudice | Page 4

tribes with rum and Maxim guns,
thou makest money by corrupting the East with opium. Thou allowest
the Armenians to be done to death, and thou wilt not put a stop to
child-marriages in India."
"But for thee I should have been alive to-day," broke in a venerable
spirit hovering near the ceiling. "If thou hadst refused to sell poison
except in specially shaped bottles----"
"What canst thou expect of a man who allows anybody to carry
firearms?" interrupted another voice.
"Or who fills his newspaper with divorce cases?"
"Is it any wonder the rising generation is cynical, and the young maiden
of fifteen has ceased to be bashful?"

"Shame on thee!" hissed the chorus, and advanced upon me so
threateningly that I seized my hat and rushed from the room. But a
burly being with a Blue Book blocked my way.
"Where didst thou get that hat?" he cried. "Doubtless from some
sweating establishment. And those clothes; didst thou investigate where
they were made? didst thou inquire how much thy tailor paid his hands?
didst thou engage an accountant to examine his books?"
"I--I am so busy," I stammered feebly.
"Shuffler! How knowest thou thou art not spreading to the world the
germs of scarlet fever and typhoid picked up in the sweaters' dens?"
"What cares he?" cried a tall, thin man, with a slight stoop and gold
spectacles. "Does he not poison the air every day with the smoke of his
coal fires?"
"Pison the air!" repeated a battered, blear-eyed reprobate. "He pisoned
my soul. He ruined me with promiskus charity. Whenever I was
stoney-broke 'e give me doles in aid, 'e did. 'E wos werry bad to me, 'e
wos. 'E destroyed my self-respeck, druv me to drink, broke up my
home, and druv my darters on the streets."
"This is what comes of undisciplined compassion," observed the
gold-spectacled gentleman, glowering at me. "The integrity and virtue
of a whole family sacrificed to the gratification of thy altruistic
emotions!"
"Stand out of the way!" I cried to the burly man; "I wish to leave my
own house."
"And carry thy rudeness abroad?" he retorted indignantly. "Perchance
thou wouldst like to go to the Continent, and swagger through Europe
clad in thy loud-patterned checks and thine insular self-sufficiency."
I tried to move him out of the way by brute force, and we wrestled, and
he threw me. I heard myself strike the floor with a thud.

Rubbing my eyes, instead of my back, I discovered that I was safe in
my reading-chair, and that it was the lady novelist's novel that had
made the noise. I picked it up, but I still seemed to see the reproachful
eyes of a thousand tormentors, and hear their objurgations. Yet I had
none of the emotions of Scrooge, no prickings of conscience, no
ferment of good resolutions. Instead, I felt a wave of bitterness and
indignation flooding my soul.
"I will not be responsible for the universe!" I cried to the ceiling. "I am
sick of the woman question, and the problem of man makes my gorge
rise. Is there one question in the world that can really be settled? No,
not one, except by superficial thinkers. Just as the comprehensive
explanation of 'the flower in the crannied wall' is the explanation of the
whole universe, so every question is but a thin layer of ice over infinite
depths. You may touch it lightly, you may skate over it; but press it at
all, and you sink into bottomless abysses. The simplest interrogation is
a doorway to chaos, to endless perspectives of winding paths
perpetually turning upon themselves in a blind maze. Suppose one is
besought to sign a petition against capital punishment. A really
conscientious and logical person, pursuing truth after the manner
recommended by Descartes, and professed by Huxley, could not settle
this question for himself without going into the endless question of
Free-will versus Necessity, and studying the various systems of
philosophy and ethics. Murder may be due to insane impulse: Insanity
must therefore be studied. Moreover, ought not hanging to be abolished
in cases of murder and reserved for more noxious crimes, such as those
of fraudulent directors? This opens up new perspectives and new lines
of study. The whole theory of Punishment would also have to be gone
into: should it be restrictive, or revengeful, or reformative? (See
Aristotle, Bentham, Owen, etc.) Incidentally great tracts of the science
of Psychology are involved. And what right have we to interfere with
our fellow-creatures at all? This opens up the vast domains of Law and
Government, and requires the perusal of Montesquieu, Bodin,
Rousseau, Mill, etc., etc. Sociology would also be called in to
determine the beneficent or maleficent influence of the
death-punishment upon the popular mind; and statistics would