But I want to speak of other classes of murderers that are very
numerous in this country, although they are not classified as
murderers. The man who is the cause of the death of another through
criminal carelessness is guilty. The man who sells diseased meat; the
saloon-keeper whose drink has maddened the brain of a criminal; those
who adulterate food; the employer who jeopardizes the lives of
employees and others by unsafe surroundings and conditions in harmful
occupations,--they are all guilty of blood where life is lost as a
consequence.
When I was in England in 1892, I met a gentleman who claimed that they
were ahead of us in the respect they had for the law. "We hang our
murderers," he said, "but there isn't one out of twenty in your
country that is hung." I said, "You are greatly mistaken, for they
walk about these two countries unhung." "What do you mean?" "I will
tell you what I mean," I said; "the man that comes into my house and
runs a dagger into my heart for my money, is a prince compared with a
son that takes five years to kill me and the wife of my bosom. A young
man who comes home night after night drunk, and when his mother
remonstrates, curses her grey hairs and kills her by inches, is the
blackest kind of a murderer."
That kind of thing is going on constantly all around us. One young man
at college, an only son, whose mother wrote to him remonstrating
against his gambling and drinking habits, took the letters out of the
post-office, and when he found that they were from her, he tore them
up without reading them. She said,
"I thought I would die when I found I had lost my hold on that son."
If a boy kills his mother by his conduct, you can't call it anything
else than _murder_, and he is as truly guilty of breaking this sixth
commandment as if he drove a dagger to her heart. If all young men in
this country who are killing their parents and their wives by inches,
should be hung this next week, there would be a great many funerals.
How are you treating your parents? Come, are you killing them? This
sixth commandment follows very naturally after the fifth,--"Honor thy
father and thy mother." Don't put any thorns in their pillows and make
their last days miserable. Bear in mind that the commandment refers
not only to shooting a man down in cold blood; but he is the worst
murderer who goes on, month after month, year after year, until he has
crowded the life out of a sainted mother and put a godly father under
the sod.