Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 11 ficult to contend against it.
‘One day we see a brilliant young officer of high society,
at the very outset of his career, in a cowardly underhand
way, without a pang of conscience, murdering an official
who had once been his benefactor, and the servant girl, to
steal his own I O U and what ready money he could find on
him; ‘it will come in handy for my pleasures in the fashion-
able world and for my career in the future.’ After murdering
them, he puts pillows under the head of each of his victims;
he goes away. Next, a young hero ‘decorated for bravery’
kills the mother of his chief and benefactor, like a highway-
man, and to urge his companions to join him he asserts that
‘she loves him like a son, and so will follow all his directions
and take no precautions.’ Granted that he is a monster, yet
I dare not say in these days that he is unique. Another man
will not commit the murder, but will feel and think like him,
and is as dishonourable in soul. In silence, alone with his
conscience, he asks himself perhaps, ‘What is honour, and
isn’t the condemnation of bloodshed a prejudice?’
‘Perhaps people will cry out against me that I am morbid,
hysterical, that it is a monstrous slander, that I am exag-
gerating. Let them say so — and heavens! I should be the
first to rejoice if it were so! Oh, don’t believe me, think of
me as morbid, but remember my words; if only a tenth, if
only a twentieth part of what I say is true — even so it’s aw-
ful! Look how our young people commit suicide, without
asking themselves Hamlet’s question what there is beyond,
without a sign of such a question, as though all that relates
to the soul and to what awaits us beyond the grave had long