ence of any
traceable or untraceable ancestor of his for twenty centuries, and it
is not likely to fall within the experience of any descendant of his for
twenty more.

Time has made some great changes since the Roman days. The murder of
an empress then--even the assassination of Caesar himself--could not
electrify the world as this murder has electrified it. For one reason,
there was then not much of a world to electrify; it was a small world,
as to known bulk, and it had rather a thin population, besides; and for
another reason, the news traveled so slowly that its tremendous initial
thrill wasted away, week by week and month by month, on the journey, and
by the time it reached the remoter regions there was but little of it
left. It was no longer a fresh event, it was a thing of the far past;
it was not properly news, it was history. But the world is enormous
now, and prodigiously populated--that is one change; and another is the
lightning swiftness of the flight of tidings, good and bad. "The Empress
is murdered!" When those amazing words struck upon my ear in this
Austrian village last Saturday, three hours after the disaster, I knew
that it was already old news in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, San
Francisco, Japan, China, Melbourne, Cape Town, Bombay, Madras,
Calcutta, and that the entire globe with a single voice, was cursing
the perpetrator of it. Since the telegraph first began to stretch itself
wider and wider about the earth, larger and increasingly larger areas of
the world have, as time went on, received simultaneously the shock of
a great calamity; but this is the first time in history that the entire
surface of the globe has been swept in a single instant with the thrill
of so gigantic an event.

And who is the miracle-worker who has furnished to the world this
spectacle? All the ironies are compacted in the answer. He is at the
bottom of the human ladder, as the accepted estimates of degree and
value go: a soiled and patched young loafer, without gifts, without
talents, without education, without morals, without character, without
any born charm or any acquired one that wins or beguiles or attracts;
without a single grace of mind or heart or hand that any tramp or
prostitute could envy him; an unfaithful private in the ranks, an
incompetent stone-cutter, an inefficient lackey; in a word, a mangy,
offensive, empty, unwashed, vulgar, gross, mephitic, timid, sneaking,
human polecat. And it was within th