Defence of Criminals 



poor are systematically starving ; and it is certain 

 that the vivisection of animals which on the 

 whole is approved by our educated classes (though 

 not by the healthier sentiment of the uneducated) 

 would have been stigmatised as one of the 

 most abominable crimes by the ancient Egyptians I 

 if, that is, they could have conceived such a 

 practice possible at all. 



But not only do the moral judgments of man- 

 kind thus vary from age to age and from race 

 to race, but what is equally remarkable they 

 vary to an extraordinary degree from class to class 

 of the same society. If the landlord class regards 

 the poacher as a criminal, the poacher, as already 

 hinted, looks upon the landlord as a selfish ruffian 

 who has the police on his side ; if the respectable 

 shareholder, politely and respectably subsisting 

 on dividends, dismisses navvies and the frequenters 

 of public-houses as disorderly persons, the navvy 

 in return despises the shareholder as a sneaking 

 thief. And it is not easy to see, after all, which is 

 in the right. It is useless to dismiss these dis- 

 crepancies by supposing that one class in the nation 

 possesses a monopoly of morality and that the other 

 classes simply rail at the virtue they cannot attain 

 to, for this is obviously not the case. It is almost 

 a commonplace, and certainly a fact that cannot 

 be contested, that every class however sinful 

 or outcast in the eyes of others contains within 

 its ranks a large proportion of generous, noble, 



1 In the later Egyptian centuries vivisection apparently became 

 an approved practice. 



