on
our death-beds no more than wealth or stuffed birds of paradise.
Logically, then, every circumstance shouts to us to be brave. But,
alas! bravery, though in face of the disasters of others it is easy
enough, in the face of our own disasters is a rare and splendid form
of genius, To attain it is the crown of existence.

XXII

THE RIGHTS OF MURDER

Mr Justice Darling, before passing a sentence of seven years' penal
servitude on Julia Decies for wounding her lover with intent to kill
him, made a remark which must interest all students of the morals of
murder. No one, probably, he declared, would very much lament the
wounded man, but "that was not the question." So far as one can gather
from the scrappy reports in the newspapers, the crime was in the main
a crime of jealousy. The man and woman had lived together for some
years, had then separated, had come back to each other, and had
finally quarrelled as the result of a suggestion "that he had taken up
with some other woman, with whom he was going to Paris." Incidentally
it was stated that the man had given Julia Decies L500 and some
furniture in the previous October on the understanding that she was to
trouble him no further. It was also stated that "the prosecutor had
infected the woman with a terrible disease and that she was
pregnant." There you have a story of contemporary life as mean in its
horror as any that Gorky has written. It is a story in which the only
conceivably beautiful element is the insurgent anger of the woman. It
is a tragedy, not of heroic suffering, but of the dull slums of human
nature. Probably, in any country where they managed things according
to "rough justice" instead of with judges and juries, no one would
have blamed Julia Decies even to the extent of a day's imprisonment
for seeking to avenge herself in the most extreme form on an
environment so intolerable--on a man whom, in the judge's phrase, "no
one, probably, would very much lament." There is a mining camp logic
which holds that if a man is not worth lamenting, one need not be
greatly concerned whether he is alive or dead. Civilisation however,
speaking from under the wig of Mr Justice Darling, says of even the
most worthless of its human products: "He was a person whose life was
entitled to the protection of the law as though he were a person with
the best of characters." To the moralist of the mining camp this would
seem like saying that the weeds have as good a right