THE ORDEAL OF INGERSOLL
A LIE can travel halfway around the world, said Mark
Twain, while the truth is getting its clothes on. Robert G. Ingersoll, who
began each day with an answer to a lie, put it this way: "It is almost
impossible to overtake, and kill, and bury a lie. If you do, some one will
erect a monument over the grave, and the lie is born again as an epitaph."
We cannot at once point to a man who was more a victim of the ubiquitous,
irrepressible lie than was Ingersoll: and, while Ingersoll was too big a man to
be destroyed by the...
