"He paid it a compliment- with a hatchet."

Men of the school of Nietzsche or of Mr. Bernard Shaw often talk of self-sacrifice as if it meant the same as self-subordination or self-effacement. To sacrifice a thing is the Latin for making a thing holy. If you sacrifice yourself you make yourself something solemn and important. The old Pagan did not sacrifice his worst beast; he sacrificed his best beast to his gods. He paid it a compliment- with a hatchet. It would be an awful and stimulating thought to imagine this process of selection applied, for instance, to the human fauna of London. It is beautiful to think of the honest cabman being solemnly immolated because of his worthiness, and then of the stockbroker being spledidly and scornfully spared. But in any case, self-sacrifice is for this reason the opposite of self-effacement; and for this reason self-sacrifice is the very opposite of suicide. If you really think yourself a worm you have no right to practice self-sacrifice. Worms (unlike cabman) are not creatures fit for the altar.

-July 21, 1906, Illustrated London News