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The Jacket (The Star-Rover)-Part46_JACK LONDON(1876-1916)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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that kept the vastness of space, like a monster, from pouncing upon



me were those good stout walls of mine, close to hand on every side.

Agoraphobia is a terrible affliction. I have had little opportunity



to experience it, but from that little I can only conclude that

hanging is a far easier matter. . . .



I have just had a hearty laugh. The prison doctor, a likable chap,

has just been in to have a yarn with me, incidentally to proffer me



his good offices in the matter of dope. Of course I declined his

proposition to "shoot me" so full of morphine through the night that



to-morrow I would not know, when I marched to the gallows, whether I

was "coming or going."



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 abstractmorality 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 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




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