since Eve. Today the lie is after your neighbour; to-morrow it is after
you. It travels so fast that a million people can see it the next
morning. It listens at keyholes, it can hear whispers: it has one ear to
the East, the other to the West. An old-fashioned tea-table is its
jubilee, and a political campaign is its heaven. Avoid it you may not,
but meet it with calmness and without fear. It is always an outrage, a
persecution.

Nothing more offensive to public sentiment could have occurred than the
attempt made in New York in the autumn of 1887 to hinder the appointment
of a new pastor of Trinity Church, on the plea that he came from a
foreign country, and therefore was an ally to foreign labour. It was an
outrage on religion, on the Church, on common sense. As a nation,
however, we were safe. There was not another place in the world where
its chief ruler could travel five thousand miles, for three weeks,
unprotected by bayonets, as Mr. Cleveland did on his Presidential tour
of the country. It was a universal huzzah, from Mugwumps, Republicans,
and Democrats. We were a safe nation because we destroyed Communism.

The execution of the anarchists in Chicago, in November, 1887, was a
disgusting exhibition of the gallows. It took ten minutes for some of
them to die by strangulation. Nothing could have been more barbaric than
this method of hanging human life. I was among the first to publicly
propose execution by electricity. Mr. Edison, upon a request from the
government, could easily have arranged it. I was particularly horrified
with the blunders of the hangman's methods, because I was in a friend's
office in New York, when the telegraph wires gave instantaneous reports
of the executions in Chicago. I made notes of these flashes of death.

"Now the prisoners leave the cells," said the wire; "now they are