to exist as the
flowers.

It is obviously one of the earliest instincts of man to get rid of his
rivals by killing them. Cain was representative of the human race at
this barbarous stage. It is the stage of unhampered egoism, of
_laissez-faire_ applied to morals. Poets, who sometimes inherit this
egoism, have written sympathetically of Cain: now that art is becoming
deliberately primitive again, we may expect to see new statues to Cain
insolently set up in the poets' back bedrooms. Civilisation is, in one
aspect, a war against Cain and the minor poets. It depends in its
early stages on the suppression of the private right to murder--on the
socialisation, one may say, of the right to kill. No doubt, even in
the most highly-developed civilisations, the right to kill is still
left to some extent in the hands of private individuals. One has the
right to kill certain people in self-defence. But the more advanced
civilisation is, the more limited will that right be. So limited has
it become in modern England that it has been maintained one is not
even entitled to shoot a burglar unless, by running away and in
various other ways, one has first exhausted all the gentler devices
for escaping injury at his hands. This may seem a sad falling-away
from the dramatic virtues of the heroic age, when one slung dead
burglars round one's neck like a bag of game. But the heroic age, as
has been pointed out, was an age of egoists, not of citizens. When
heroes evolved into citizens, as we see in the history of Athens, the
culminating triumph came with the abandonment of the right to kill as
symbolised in the carrying of arms. Athens was the first city in
Greece in which the men went about unarmed. That was a recognition of
the fact that civilised man is not a killing animal to the greatest
degree possible, but only in the least degree possible.

It may be retorted, on the other hand, that murder was not condoned in
the case either of Cain or of Orestes, and there are many other
examples of guilty murderers in the heroic age. This, however, only
means that there was some limitation put upon the right to kill from
the beginning. The right to kill did not exist as against the members
of one's own family. It would have been impossible to explain the
humour of _The Playboy of the Western World_ to men of the heroic age.
The women who flocked with their farmhouse gifts to show their
appreciation of the boy who had killed his father would have