I read the other day the true story of a little East Side tailor who could not earn enough to support himself and his wife.  He became half-crazed from lack of food and together they resolved to commit suicide.  Somehow he secured a small 22-caliber rook rifle and a couple of cartridges.  The wife knelt down on the bed in her nightgown, with her face to the wall, and repeated a prayer while he shot her in the back.  When he saw her sink to the floor dead he became so unnerved that, instead of turning the rifle on himself, he ran out into the street, with chattering teeth, calling for help.

This tragedy was absolutely the result of economic conditions, for the man was a hardworking and intelligent fellow, who could not find employment and who went off his head from lack of nourishment.

Now “I put it to you,” as they say in the English law courts, how much of a personal sacrifice would you have made to prevent this tragedy?  What would that little East Side Jewess’ life have been worth to you?  She is dead.  Her soul may or may not be with God.  As a suicide the Church would say it must be in hell.  Well, how much would you have done to preserve her life or keep her soul out of hell?

Frankly, would you have parted with five hundred dollars to save that woman’s life?  Five hundred dollars?  Let me tell you that you would not voluntarily have given up smoking cigars for one year to avoid that tragedy!  Of course you would have if challenged to do so.  If the fact that the killing could be avoided in some such way or at a certain price, and the discrepancy between the cost and the value of the life were squarely brought to your particular attention, you might and probably would do something.  How much is problematical.

Let us do you the credit of saying that you would give five hundred dollars—­and take it out of some other charity.  But what if you were given another chance to save a life for five hundred dollars?  All right; you will save that too.  Now a third!  You hesitate.  That will be spending fifteen hundred dollars—­a good deal.  Still you decide to do it.  Yet how embarrassing!  You find an opportunity to save a fourth, a fifth—­a hundred lives at the same price!  What are you going to do?

We all of us have such a chance in one way or another.  The answer is that, in spite of the admonition of Christ to sell our all and give to the poor, and others of His teachings as contained in the Sermon on the Mount, you probably, in order to save the lives of persons unknown to you, would not sacrifice a single substantial material comfort for one year; and that your impulse to save the lives of persons actually brought to your knowledge would diminish, fade away and die in direct proportion to the necessity involved of changing your present luxurious mode of life.