Page:Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.djvu/85

 There was no bedstead, and no furniture in the room except the straw mattress and the ragged clothes and blankets upon the floor.

The man's body was found in the kitchen, lying with outstretched arms face downwards on the floor, surrounded by the blood from the terrible wound in his throat, which had evidently been inflicted by the razor that was grasped in his right hand.

No particle of food was found, but attached to a nail in the kitchen wall was a piece of blood-smeared paper on which was written in pencil:

'This is not my crime, but Society's.'

The report went on to explain that the deed must have been perpetrated during a fit of temporary insanity, brought on by the sufferings the man had endured.

'Insanity!' muttered Owen, as he read this glib theory, 'Insanity! It seems to me that he would have been insane if he had not killed them.'

Surely it was wiser and better and kinder to send them all to sleep, than to let them continue to suffer.

At the same time it seemed strange that the man should have chosen to do it in that way, when there were so many other cleaner, easier and less painful ways of accomplishing his object.

One could take poison. Of course, there was a certain amount of difficulty in procuring it, and one would have to be very careful not to select one that would cause a lot of pain.

Owen went over to his bookshelf and took down 'The Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine,' an old, rather out-of-date book, which he thought might contain the required information. He was astonished to find what a number of poisons there were within easy reach of whoever wished to make use of them: poisons which could be relied upon to do their work certainly, quickly and without pain. Why, it was not even necessary to buy them; one could gather them from the hedges by the roadside and in the fields.

The more he thought of it the stranger it seemed that such a clumsy method as a razor should be so popular. Strangulation or even hanging would be better than that, though the latter method could scarcely be adopted in their flat, because there were no beams or rafters or anything from which it would be possible to suspend a cord. Still, he could drive some 73