the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now
is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him,
burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out
to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek
it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property
to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy
the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage,
or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even
ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage
as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to
attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the
sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But
philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other
people's."

Syme struck his hands together.

"How true that is," he cried. "I have felt it from my boyhood, but
never could state the verbal antithesis. The common criminal is a
bad man, but at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man.
He says that if only a certain obstacle be removed--say a wealthy
uncle--he is then prepared to accept the universe and to praise
God. He is a reformer, but not an anarchist. He wishes to cleanse
the edifice, but not to destroy it. But the evil philosopher is
not trying to alter things, but to annihilate them. Yes, the
modern world has retained all those parts of police work which are
really oppressive and ignominious, the harrying of the poor, the
spying upon the unfortunate. It has given up its more dignified
work, the punishment of powerful traitors in the State and