In these modern days, the very wealth of our experience overwhelms us, and makes life harder to live in the sight of evil. The broadening of communication, giving us a connection through newspapers and magazines with the whole world, has made our experience almost as wide as the world. In that experience, however, we get all the world’s horrors as well as its interests and delights. Thus has it been that this widening, which has meant the possibility of living the contemplative and imaginative life on an infinitely higher plane than before, has meant also a soul-sickness to the more sensitive, because of the immense and over-burdening drafts on their sympathy which the new experience involved. Although our increased knowledge of the world has meant everywhere reform, and has vastly improved and beautified life for millions of men, it has at the same time opened a nerve the pain of which no opiate has been able to soothe. And along with the real increase of longevity and sounder health for civilized man, attained through the triumphs of medical science, there has come a renewed realization of the shortness and precariousness, at its best, of life. The fact that our knowledge of evil is shared by millions of men intensifies, I think, our sensitiveness. Through the genius of display writers, thousands of readers are enabled to be present imaginatively at scenes of horror. The subtle sense of a vast concourse having witnessed the scene magnifies its potency to the individual mind, and gives it the morbid touch as of crowds witnessing an execution.