But the laugh.  It was just like Jake Oppenheimer.  I can see the lean keenness of the man as he strung the reporters with his deliberate bull which they thought involuntary.  It seems, his last morning, breakfast finished, incased in the shirt without a collar, that the reporters, assembled for his last word in his cell, asked him for his views on capital punishment.

—­Who says we have more than the slightest veneer of civilization coated over our raw savagery when a group of living men can ask such a question of a man about to die and whom they are to see die?

But 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.