In civilized countries the struggle for existence is severe--the competition far sharper than in savage lands. The consequence is that there are many failures. These failures lack, it may be, opportunity or brain or moral force or industry, or something without which, under the circumstances, success is impossible. Certain lines of conduct are called legal, and certain others criminal, and the men who fail in one line may be driven to the other. How do we know that it is possible for all people to be honest? Are we certain that all people can tell the truth? Is it possible for all men to be generous or candid or courageous?
I am perfectly satisfied that there are millions of people incapable of committing certain crimes, and it may be true that there are millions of others incapable of practicing certain virtues. We do not blame a man because he is not a sculptor, a poet, a painter, or a statesman. We say he has not the genius. Are we certain that it does not require genius to be good? Where is the man with intelligence enough to take into consideration the circumstances of each individual case? Who has the mental balance with which to weigh the forces of heredity, of want, of temptation,--and who can analyze with certainty the mysterious motions of the brain? Where and what are the sources of vice and virtue? In what obscure and shadowy recesses of the brain are passions born? And what is it that for the moment destroys the sense of right and wrong?
Who knows to what extent reason becomes the prisoner of passion--of some strange and wild desire, the seeds of which were sown, it may be, thousands of years ago in the breast of some savage? To what extent do antecedents and surroundings affect the moral sense?
Is it not possible that the tyranny of governments, the injustice of nations, the fierceness of what is called the law, produce in the individual a tendency in the same direction? Is it not true that the citizen is apt to imitate his nation? Society degrades its enemies--the individual seeks to degrade his. Society plunders its enemies, and now and then the citizen has the desire to plunder his. Society kills its enemies, and possibly sows in the heart of some citizen the seeds of murder.