criminal courts. Germany to-day has been guilty of a perverse
and criminal adventure, the outcome of that false morality
applied to historical transactions, of which Carlyle's life of
Frederick is a monumental example. In that book we have a
man whose instincts in more ways than one were those of a
criminal, held up for our admiration, in the same way that the
same writer fell into dithyrambic praise over a villain called
Francia, a former President of Paraguay. A most interesting work
might be written on the great criminals of history, and might do
something towards restoring that balance of moral judgment in
historical transactions, for the perversion of which we are
suffering to-day.

In the meantime we must be content to study in the microcosm of
ordinary crime those instincts, selfish, greedy, brutal which,
exploited often by bad men in the so-called cause of nations,
have wrought such havoc to the happiness of mankind. It is not
too much to say that in every man there dwell the seeds of crime;
whether they grow or are stifled in their growth by the good that
is in us is a chance mysteriously determined. As children of
nature we must not be surprised if our instincts are not all that
they should be. "In sober truth," writes John Stuart Mill,
"nearly all the things for which men are hanged or imprisoned for
doing to one another are nature's everyday performances," and in
another passage: "The course of natural phenomena being replete
with everything which when committed by human beings is most
worthy of abhorrence, anyone who endeavoured in his actions to
imitate the natural course of things would be universally seen
and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men."