did it because we so desired, because of whim, if you so
please. But we were not hypocrites. We did not call upon press, and
pulpit, and university to sanction us in our wilfulness of savagery. What
we wanted to do we went and did, on our legs upstanding, and we faced all
reproof and censure on our legs upstanding, and did not hide behind the
skirts of classical economists and bourgeois philosophers, nor behind the
skirts of subsidized preachers, professors, and editors.

Why, goodness me, a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, five years ago,
in these United States, assault and battery was not a civil capital
crime. But this year, the year of Our Lord 1913, in the State of
California, they hanged Jake Oppenheimer for such an offence, and
to-morrow, for the civil capital crime of punching a man on the nose,
they are going to take me out and hang me. Query: Doesn't it require a
long time for the ape and the tiger to die when such statutes are spread
on the statute book of California in the nineteen-hundred-and-thirteenth
year after Christ? Lord, Lord, they only crucified Christ. They have
done far worse to Jake Oppenheimer and me. . . .

* * * * *

As Ed Morrell once rapped to me with his knuckles: "The worst possible
use you can put a man to is to hang him." No, I have little respect for
capital punishment. Not only is it a dirty game, degrading to the hang-
dogs who personally perpetrate it for a wage, but it is degrading to the
commonwealth that tolerates it, votes for it, and pays the taxes for its
maintenance. Capital punishment is so _silly_, so stupid, so horribly
unscientific. "To be hanged by the neck until dead" is society's quaint
phraseology . . .

* * * * *

Morning is come--my last morning. I slept like a babe throughout the
night. I slept so peacefully that once the death-watch got a fright. He
thought I had suffocated myself in my blankets. The poor man's alarm was
pitiful. His bread and butter was at stake. Had it truly been so, it
would have meant a black mark against him, perhaps discharge and the
outlook for an unemployed man is bitter just at present. They tell me
that Europe began liquidating two years ago, and that now the United
States has begun. That means either a business crisis or a quiet panic
and that the armies of the unemployed will be large next winter, the
bread-lines long. . . .

I have had my breakfast. It seemed a silly thing to do, but I ate it
heartily. T