ut Jake was ever game. "Gentlemen," he said, "I hope to live to see the
day when capital punishment is abolished."

I have lived many lives through the long ages. Man, the individual, has
made no moral progress in the past ten thousand years. I affirm this
absolutely. The difference between an unbroken colt and the patient
draught-horse is purely a difference of training. Training is the only
moral difference between the man of to-day and the man of ten thousand
years ago. Under his thin skin of morality which he has had polished
onto him, he is the same savage that he was ten thousand years ago.
Morality is a social fund, an accretion through the painful ages. The
new-born child will become a savage unless it is trained, polished, by
the abstract morality that has been so long accumulating.

"Thou shalt not kill"--piffle! They are going to kill me to-morrow
morning. "Thou shalt not kill"--piffle! In the shipyards of all
civilized countries they are laying to-day the keels of Dreadnoughts and
of Superdreadnoughts. Dear friends, I who am about to die, salute you
with--"Piffle!"

I ask you, what finer morality is preached to-day than was preached by
Christ, by Buddha, by Socrates and Plato, by Confucius and whoever was
the author of the "Mahabharata"? Good Lord, fifty thousand years ago, in
our totem-families, our women were cleaner, our family and group
relations more rigidly right.

I must say that the morality we practised in those old days was a finer
morality than is practised to-day. Don't dismiss this thought hastily.
Think of our child labour, of our police graft and our political
corruption, of our food adulteration and of our slavery of the daughters
of the poor. When I was a Son of the Mountain and a Son of the Bull,
prostitution had no meaning. We were clean, I tell you. We did not
dream such depths of depravity. Yea, so are all the lesser animals of to-
day clean. It required man, with his imagination, aided by his mastery
of matter, to invent the deadly sins. The lesser animals, the other
animals, are incapable of sin.

I read hastily back through the many lives of many times and many places.
I have never known cruelty more terrible, nor so terrible, as the cruelty
of our prison system of to-day. I have told you what I have endured in
the jacket and in solitary in the first decade of this twentieth century
after Christ. In the old days we punished drastically and killed
quickly. We