1,500 people died today.

1,500 people died yesterday, too. 

Civilians, all of them; unarmed, all of them; gone forever, all of them, erased (as far as we understand it) from the world. Their children are next. 

There are, by the best estimates of a generation of bright young scientists, 80 million subjects of the far-flung Númenorean empire, and within three hundred years all eighty million of them will be dead. One thousand five hundred, every single day. 

Ah, now you realize what I meant with those first words. I don't mean "a plague swept through Rómenna and killed fifteen hundred people' or "soldiers in Umbar suppressed an uprising by slaughtering fifteen hundred civilians" or "fifteen hundred children died of famine in the East'. I merely mean that they got old, and that they died of old age, and now that you know what I mean you aren't shocked, are you? You aren't frightened, you aren't horrified. If I told you our soldiers slaughtered fifteen hundred innocent people you'd be moved to outrage, to rebellion. You'd kill to end the murders and protect their children, and their children's children, from meeting the same fate. You'd fight all your life to see the killers brought to justice.

But they were not slaughtered by swords or plague or hunger. They were slaughtered by old age. So you don't care at all, do you? You'll sleep well tonight."