stry had for fifty years softened hard hearts, bred
generosity in cold ones, kindled emotion in dead ones, uplifted base
ones, broadened bigoted ones, and made many and many a stricken one
glad and filled it brimful of gratitude, figuratively spit upon in
his unoffending coffin by this crawling, slimy, sanctimonious,
self-righteous reptile!

APPENDIX K

A SUBSTITUTE FOR RULOFF HAVE WE A SIDNEY CARTON AMONG US?

(See Chapter lxxxii)

To EDITOR of 'Tribune'.

SIR,--I believe in capital punishment. I believe that when a murder has
been done it should be answered for with blood. I have all my life been
taught to feel this way, and the fetters of education are strong. The
fact that the death--law is rendered almost inoperative by its very
severity does not alter my belief in its righteousness. The fact that in
England the proportion of executions to condemnations is one to sixteen,
and in this country only one to twenty-two, and in France only one to
thirty-eight, does not shake my steadfast confidence in the propriety
of retaining the death-penalty. It is better to hang one murderer in
sixteen, twenty-two, thirty-eight than not to hang any at all.

Feeling as I do, I am not sorry that Ruloff is to be hanged, but I am
sincerely sorry that he himself has made it necessary that his vast
capabilities for usefulness should be lost to the world. In this, mine
and the public's is a common regret. For it is plain that in the person
of Ruloff one of the most marvelous of intellects that any age has
produced is about to be sacrificed, and that, too, while half the
mystery of its strange powers is yet a secret. Here is a man who has
never entered the doors of a college or a university, and yet by the
sheer might of his innate gifts has made himself such a colossus in
abstruse learning that the ablest of our scholars are but pigmies in
his presence. By the evidence of Professor Mather, Mr. Surbridge, Mr.
Richmond, and other men qualified to testify, this man is as familiar
with the broad domain of philology as common men are with the passing
events of the day. His memory has such a limitless grasp that he is able
to quote sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, chapter
after chapter, from a gnarled and knotty ancient literature that
ordinary scholars are capable of achieving little more than a bowing
acquaintance with. But his memory is the least of his great endowments.
By the testimony of the gentlemen above