The career of the well-known Chicago gunman Marx is an illustration of the folly of taking things too literally. According to what he stated to the police, his aim was to become a man of means, a respectable citizen, and a churchmember by the method of robbing people of their property and, if necessary, by dispatching a few people out of this world into the next. Poor young man! He had grasped the great truth that the attractive aims just mentioned could be attained by the means he employed, but he had interpreted this truth too literally. And for this reason, he lost out.

If instead of going about revolver in hand, robbing and killing, he had undertaken to deal in foods derogatory to health or in some more or less poisonous patent medicine, then there is not much doubt that he would 2have become rich and respectable. If he wanted to, he might have had a Sunday school class to teach, at the same time enjoying the knowledge that he was sending far more people into the next world than he could possibly dispatch by the mere use of his revolver. He ought to have realized that however friendly our police may be to bandits, he would not be permitted to go about shooting people without sooner or later being stopped. But as a dealer in half-decayed foods or poisonous patent medicines, he might have continued selling these products to his dying day with no interference. And his day of death! He would have the privilege of drawing his final breath in an expensive bed,...and the cause of his death would have been expressed in language as non-understandable as it was scientific and dignified.

As things are, though, the prospects are that he will end his life on the gallows.....Let this be a warning to our readers not to take things too literally.