himself–could not electrify the world as this murder has
electrified it. For one reason, there was then not much of a
world to electrify; it was a small world, as to known bulk, and
it had rather a thin population, besides; and for another reason,
the news traveled so slowly that its tremendous initial thrill
wasted away, week by week and month by month, on the journey, and
by the time it reached the remoter regions there was but little
of it left. It was no longer a fresh event, it was a thing of
the far past; it was not properly news, it was history. But the
world is enormous now, and prodigiously populated–that is one
change; and another is the lightning swiftness of the flight of
tidings, good and bad. “The Empress is murdered!” When those
amazing words struck upon my ear in this Austrian village last
Saturday, three hours after the disaster, I knew that it was
already old news in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, San
Francisco, Japan, China, Melbourne, Cape Town, Bombay, Madras,
Calcutta, and that the entire globe with a single voice, was
cursing the perpetrator of it. Since the telegraph first began
to stretch itself wider and wider about the earth, larger and
increasingly larger areas of the world have, as time went on,
received simultaneously the shock of a great calamity; but this
is the first time in history that the entire surface of the globe
has been swept in a single instant with the thrill of so gigantic
an event.
And who is the miracle-worker who has furnished to the world
this spectacle? All the ironies are compacted in the answer. He
is at the bottom of the human ladder, as the accepted estimates
of degree and value go: a soiled and patched young loafer,
without gifts, without talents, without education, without
morals, without character, without any born charm or any acquired
one that wins or beguiles or attracts; without a single grace of
mind or heart or hand that any tramp or prostitute could envy
him; an unfaithful private in the ranks, an incompetent stone-
cutter, an inefficient lackey; in a word, a mangy, offensive,
empty, unwashed, vulgar, gross, mephitic, timid, sneaking, human
polecat. And it was within the privileges and powers of this
sarcasm upon the human race to reach up–up–up–and strike from
its far summit in the social skies the world’s accepted ideal of
Glory and Might and Splendor and Sacredness! It realizes to us
what sorry shows and shadows we are. Without our clothes and our
pedestals we are poor things and much of a size; our dignities
are not real, our pomps are shams. At our best and stateliest we
are not suns, as we pretended, and teach, and believe, but only
candles; and any bummer can blow us out.
And now we get realized to us once more another thing which
we often forget–or try to: that no man has a wholly undiseased
mind; that in one way or another all men are mad. Many are mad
for money. When this madness is in a mild form it is harmless
and the man passes for sane; but when it develops powerfully and
takes possession of the man, it can make him cheat, rob, and
kill; and when he has got his fortune and lost it again it can
land him in the asylum or the suicide’s coffin. Love is a
madness; if thwarted it develops fast; it can grow to a frenzy of
despair and make an otherwise sane and highly gifted prince, like
Rudolph, throw away the crown of an empire and snuff out his own
life. All the whole list of desires, predilections, aversions,
ambitions, passions, cares, griefs, regrets, remorses, are
incipient madness, and ready to grow, spread, and consume, when
the occasion comes. There are no healthy minds, and nothing
saves any man but accident–the accident of not having his malady
put to the supreme test.
One of the commonest forms of madness is the desire to be
noticed, the pleasure derived from being noticed. Perhaps it is
not merely common, but universal. In its mildest form it
doubtless is universal. Every child is pleased at being noticed;