Word: hemlocks
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Since Socrates, after considerable palaver, raised the poison cup of hemlock and escaped the indignity of public execution, modern nations have decided that a man under sentence of death who kills himself is cheating the law. Sole exception is the dignified little Baltic State of Estonia. Until a thwarted Nazi putsch so alarmed President Konstantin Pats last year that he declared a state of martial law, Estonia had ignored the death penalty entirely. Confronted with the new problem of how to execute Estonians, President Pats devised a system of taking them into a forest near Tallinn and shooting them, always...
...Give Germans condemned to death the right to take their own lives as the Greeks gave Socrates a bowl of hemlock. In the modern Nazi State the procedure recommended last week is for the German jailor to enter the cell of the condemned and say, "Here is a pistol and a bottle of poison. Take your choice." According to the Ministry of Justice, "Criminals of the fouler sort should not, of course, receive this privilege. They should be decapitated, as at present. The theory of permitting a man to carry out his own sentence is the logical fulfillment...
...said." He has not got the sincerity ... a man should have who holds high public office. West Virginia's Senator Neely: I refuse to vote for another crucifixion. I refuse to participate in compelling one of the President's most useful friends to drink a bowl of hemlock. I refuse to help bind a Columbus of the New Deal with chains. I shall vote against the crucifixion, against the hemlock and the chains. . . . My act in so doing will be to me in future years- A rainbow to the storms of life: The evening beam that smiles...
Once upon a time there was the now defunct Kex Club of Mt. Auburn Street. "Kex", they say, is Greek for "Poison Hemlock." Some learned member of the club, knowing that Kex meant Hemlock had a pine cone engraved upon the insignia; but, alas, pines and hemlocks are two different things, a fact well known to all New Englanders, but not to the Kex Club. This sad error, however, was soon to be transcended. The Kex of the ancient Greeks was not a member of the gymnospermous order Coniferales; it is, rather, a member of the dicotyledonous family, Umbelliferae...
...Seventh" Regiment; the jist Infantry in blue & white; the 102nd Engineers in scarlet; the 102nd Medical Unit in maroon; the "Old Sixty-Ninth" in blue with green facings; the "Washington Grays" in grey with flashing sabres. Cheerful CCC workers livened their olive drab uniforms with sprigs of hemlock in their caps. Their banner announced: "We Do Our Part For The NRA; We Work In The Woods...