delinquencies. I would merely indicate that this point of conduct is the
fulcrum of _The Jewel Merchants_.

The play presents three persons, to any one of whom the committing of
murder or theft or adultery or any other suchlike interdicted feat, is
just the risking of the penalty provided against the breaking of that
especial law if you have the vile luck to be caught at it: and this to
them is all that "wickedness" can mean. We nowadays are encouraged to
think differently: but such dear privileges do not entitle us to ignore
the truth that had any of these three advanced a dissenting code of
conduct, it would, in the time and locality, have been in radical
irreverence of the best-thought-of tenets. There was no generally
recognized criminality in crime, but only a perceptible risk. So must
this trio thriftily adhere to the accepted customs of their era, and
regard an infraction of the Decalogue (for an instance) very much as we
today look on a violation of our prohibition enactments.

In fact, we have accorded to the Eighteenth Amendment almost exactly the
status then reserved for Omnipotence. You found yourself confronted by
occasionally enforced if obviously unreasonable supernal statutory
decrees, which every one broke now and then as a matter of convenience:
and every now and then, also, somebody was caught and punished, either in
this world or in the next, without his ill-fortune's involving any
disgrace or particular reprehension. As has been finely said,
righteousness and sinfulness were for the while "in strange and dreadful
peace with each other. The wicked man did not dislike virtue, nor the good
man vice: the villain could admire a saint, and the saint could excuse a
villain, in things which we often shrink from repeating, and sometimes
recoil from believing."