DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS. 



37 



mind. These ideals are tangents or vanishing points of the direction in 

 which Society is moving at the time. It does not reach its ideal, but it 

 goes in that direction then, after a time, the direction of its movements 

 changes, and it has a new ideal. 



When the ideal of Society is material gain or possession, as it is largely 

 to-day, the object of its special condemnation is the thief not the rich 

 .thief, for he is already in possession and therefore respectable, but the 

 poor thief. There is nothing to show that the poor thief is really more 

 immoral or unsocial than the respectable money-grubber ; but it is very 

 clear that the money-grubber has been floating with the great current of 

 Society, while the poor man has been swimming against it, and so has 

 been worsted. Or when, as to-day, Society rests on private property in 

 land, its counter-ideal is the poacher. If you go in the company of the 

 county squire-archy and listen to the after-dinner talk, you will soon think 

 the poacher a combination of all human and diabolic vices ; yet I have 

 known a good many poachers, and either have been very lucky in my 

 specimens or singularly prejudiced in their favor, for I have generally 

 found them very good fellows but with just this one blemish, that they 

 invariably regard a landlord as an emissary of the evil one ! The poacher 

 is as much in the right, probably, as the landlord, but he is not right for 

 the time. He is asserting a right (and an instinct) belonging to a past 

 time when for hunting purposes all land was held in common or to a 

 time in the future when such or similar rights shall be restored. Caesar 

 says of the Suevi that they tilled the ground in common, and had no 

 private lands, and there is abundant evidence that all early human com- 

 munities before they entered on the stage of modern civilisation were 

 communistic in character. Some of the Pacific Islanders to-day are in 

 the same condition. In those times private property was theft. Obvi- 

 ously the man who attempted to retain for himself land or goods, or who 

 fenced off a portion of the common ground and like the modern land- 

 lordwould allow no one to till it who did not pay him a tax was a 

 criminal of the deepest die. Nevertheless the criminals pushed their way 

 to the front, and have become the respectables of modern Society. And 

 it is quite probable that in like manner the criminals of to-day will push 

 to the front and become the respectables of a later age. 



The ascetic and monastic ideal of early Christian and mediaeval ages 

 is now regarded as foolish, if not wicked ; and poverty, which in many 

 times and places has been held in honor as the only garb of honesty, is 

 condemned as criminal and indecent Nomadism if accompanied by 

 poverty is criminal in modern Society. To-day the gipsy and the tramp 

 are hunted down. To have no settled habitation, or worse still, no place 

 to lay your head, are suspicious matters. We close even our outhouses 

 and barns against the son of man, and so to us the son of man comes not 



And yet at one time and in one stage of human progress the nomadic 

 state is the rule; and the settler is then the criminal. His crops are 



