'We have, Shiel, had before us a very remarkable series of murders, and
a very remarkable series of suicides. Were they in any way connected?
To this extent, I think--that the mysterious, the unparalleled nature
of the murders gave rise to a morbid condition in the public mind,
which in turn resulted in the epidemic of suicide. But though such an
epidemic has its origin in the instinct of imitation so common in men,
you must not suppose that the mental process is a _conscious_ one. A
person feels an impulse to go and do, and is not aware that at bottom
it is only an impulse to go and do _likewise_. He would indeed
repudiate such an assumption. Thus one man destroys himself, and
another imitates him--but whereas the former uses a pistol, the latter
uses a rope. It is rather absurd, therefore, to imagine that in any of
those cases in which the slip of papyrus has been found in the mouth
after death, the cause of death has been the slavish imitativeness of
the suicidal mania,--for this, as I say, is never _slavish._ The
papyrus then--quite apart from the unmistakable evidences of suicide
invariably left by each self-destroyer--affords us definite and certain
means by which we can distinguish the two classes of deaths; and we are
thus able to divide the total number into two nearly equal halves.

'But you start--you are troubled--you never heard or read of murder
such as this, the simultaneous murder of thousands over wide areas of
the face of the globe; here you feel is something outside your
experience, deeper than your profoundest imaginings. To the question
"by whom committed?" and "with what motive?" your mind can conceive no
possible answer. And yet the answer must be, "by man, and for human
motives,"--for the Angel of Death with flashing eye and flaming sword
is himself long dead; and again we can say at once, by no _one_ man,
but by many, a cohort, an army of men; and again, by no _common_ men,