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."

Here is explanation enough for the presence of evil in our natures, that
instinct to destroy which finds comparatively harmless expression in
certain forms of taking life, which is at its worst when we fall
to taking each other's. It is to check an inconvenient form of the
expression of this instinct that we punish murderers with death. We must
carry the definition of murder a step farther before we can count
on peace or happiness in this world. We must concentrate all our
strength on fighting criminal nature, both in ourselves and in the
world around us. With the destructive forces of nature we are waging a
perpetual struggle for our very existence. Why dissipate our strength by
fighting among ourselves? By enlarging our conception of crime we move
towards that end. What is anti-social, whether it be written in the
pages of the historian or those of the Newgate Calendar, must in the
future be regarded with equal abhorrence and subjected to equally sure
punishment. Every professor of history should now and then climb down
from the giddy heights of Thucydides and Gibbon and restore his moral
balance by comparing the acts of some of his puppets with those of their
less fortunate brethren who have dangled