Cooper was in a confidential mood.

"Isn't it true," he said, "that once so often every one of us feels impelled to go out and assassinate a college professor?"

"Why shouldn't one?" said Harding. "No one would miss a professor except, possibly, his wife and the children."

"That's just it, his children," said Cooper. "That's what makes a man hesitate. The particular college professor I have in mind recently published an article on Social Decadence in the North American Review. He deplored the tendency among our well-to-do classes toward small families. At the same time he deplored the mistaken zeal of our low-income classes in trying to more than make up for the negligence of their betters. He said, 'The American population may, therefore, be increasing most rapidly from that group least fitted by heredity or by income to develop social worth in their offspring. Such a process of "reversed selection" must mean, for the nation, a constant decrease in the social worth of each succeeding generation.' He brought forward a good many figures, but I have been so angry that I am quite unable to recall what they are."

"In that case," Harding said, "you should lose no time in seeking out the man and slaying him before his side of the case comes back to you."

"People," said Cooper, with that happy gift of his for dropping a subject to suit his own convenience, "have fallen into the habit of saying that the art of letter-writing is extinct. They say we don't write the way Madame de SÉvignÉ did or Charles Lamb. This is not true.

"For instance, on April 26, 1913, Charles Crawl, a low-income American residing in the soft-coal districts of western Pennsylvania, wrote a letter which I have not been able to get out of my mind. With that unhappy predilection for getting into tight places which is one of the characteristics of our improvident, low-income classes, Charles Crawl happened to be in one of the lower workings of the Cincinnati mine when an explosion of gas—unavoidable, as in all mine disasters—killed nearly a hundred operatives. Charles Crawl escaped injury, but after creeping through the dark for two days he felt his strength going from him, and so, with a piece of chalk, on his smudgy overalls, he wrote the following letter:

"'Good-bye, my children, God bless you.'

"He had two children, which for a man of low social worth was doing quite well. But on the other hand he was improvident enough to leave his children without a mother. When I was at college, my instructor in rhetoric was always saying that my failure to write well was due to the fact that I had nothing to say; and he used to quote passages from Isaiah to show how the thing should be done. I think my rhetoric teacher would have approved of Charles Crawl's epistolary style. I think Isaiah would have."

"But we can't all of us work in the mines," I said.

"Therefore it is not to you that America is looking for the development of an epistolary art," said Cooper; "an art in which we are bound to take first place long before our coal deposits are exhausted. Charles Crawl had his predecessors. In November, 1909, Samuel Howard was thoughtless enough to let himself be killed, with several hundred others, in the St. Paul's mine at Cherry, Illinois. He, too, left a letter behind him. He wrote:

"If I am dead, give my diamond ring to Mamie Robinson. The ring is at the post-office. I had it sent there. The only thing I regret is my brother that could help mother out after I am dead and gone. I tried my best to get out and could not.

"You see, being a low-income man, of small social worth and pitifully inefficient, even when he did his best to get out, he could not. But perhaps the subject tires you?"

"You might as well go on," said Harding. "If you finish with this subject you will have some other grievance."

"I have only two more examples of the vulgar epistolary style to cite," said Cooper. "Strictly speaking one of them is not a letter. But it is to the point. On the night of April 14, 1912, an Irishman named Dillon of low social value, in fact a stoker, happened to be swimming in the North Atlantic. The Titanic had just sunk from beneath his feet. But perhaps I had better quote the testimony before the Mersey Commission, which, being an official communication, is necessarily unanswerable, as the late Sir W.S. Gilbert pointed out:

"Then he [Dillon] swam away from the noise and came across Johnny Bannon on a grating—

"From the fact that Johnny Bannon had managed to possess himself of a grating we are justified in concluding that he was a man of somewhat higher social worth than the witness, Dillon. However,

"—came across Johnny Bannon on a grating. He said, "Cheero, Johnny," and Bannon answered, "I am all right, Paddy." There was not room on the grating for two, and Dillon, saying, "Well, so long, Johnny," swam off—

In thus leaving Johnny Bannon in undisputed possession of the grating you see that Dillon once more wrote himself down as a low-grade man unfit for competitive survival. However,

—"Well, so long, Johnny," swam off in the direction of a star where Johnny Bannon had seen a flashlight.

And as it turned out, it was, indeed, a flashlight, and Dillon was pulled out of the water to go on stoking and accelerating the process of national decadence.

"My last letter," continued Cooper, "was written in October, 1912, in the Tombs. The author was one Frank Cirofici, known to the patrons of educational moving-picture shows all over the country as Dago Frank. It was addressed to one Big Jack Zelig, a distinguished ornament of our Great White Way, cut down before his time by a bullet from behind. Cirofici wrote:

"I know the night I heard Jip and Lefty were arrested I cried like a little baby.—Dear pal, I have more faith in you than in any living being in this country. I tell you the truth right from my heart. I don't know you long, Jack, and I think if it wasn't for you, I don't know what would happen to me. Being I am a Dago, of course, you don't know what I know."

"Please," said Harding, "please don't knock a hole into your own argument by asking us to shed tears over the undefiled wells of purity that lie deep in the soul of the Bowery gunman. You won't contend that Dago Frank, when he leaves us, will be a loss to the nation."

"It would be an act of delusion on my part," said Cooper, "to expect you to see what I am driving at without going to the trouble of spelling it out for you, Harding, even if you do belong to the classes of superior social worth. What I want to express is the justifiable wrath which possesses me at this silly habit of taking a pile of figures and adding them up and dividing by three and deducing therefrom scarlet visions of Decadence and the fall of Rome and Trafalgar, and all that rot. What if empires, and republics, and incomes, and the size of families do rise and fall? Does the soul of man decay? Do the primitive loyalties decay? As long as we have men like Charles Crawl and Samuel Howard, do you think I care whether or not Harvard graduates neglect to reproduce their kind? The soul of man, as embodied in Dillon with his 'So long, Johnny,' is as sound to-day as it was ten thousand years ago, before the human race entered on its decline by putting on clothes. And Cirofici, pouring his soul out to his 'pal,' crying like a child over those poor lambs, Lefty Lewis and Gyp the Blood—"

"If that's what you mean," said Harding with suspicious humility, "I quite agree with you. You know, I have often—"

"Once you agree with me," said Cooper, "I don't see why it is necessary for you to continue."