52 DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS: 



tal) man than you, but the mere fact that I have violated the laws and 

 been clapped into prison does not prove it. There may be, probably is, 

 a real and eternal difference represented by the words Right and Wrong, 

 but no statement that we can make will ever quite avail to define it. One 

 use, however, of all these laws and codes in the past, imperfect though 

 they were, may have been to gradually excite the consciousness in the in- 

 dividual of his opposition to Society, and so prepare the way of a true rec- 

 oncilement. As Paul says " I had not known sin, but by the law," and 

 if we had not been cudgeled and bruised for centuries by this rough blud- 

 geon of social convention we should not now be so sensitive as we are to 

 the eifect of our actions upon our neighbors, nor so ready for a social life 

 in the future which shall be superior to law. 



Of course the ultimate reconcilement of the individual with Society 

 of the unit Man with the mass-Man involves the subordination of the 

 desires, their subjection to the true self. And this is a most important 

 point. It is no easy lapse that is here suggested, from morality into a 

 mere jungle of human passion; but a toilsome and long ascent involv- 

 ing for a time at any rate a determined self-control into ascendancy over 

 the passions; it involves the complete mastery, one by one, of them all; 

 and the recognition and allowance of them only because they are mas- 

 tered. And it is just this training and subjection of the passions as of 

 winged horses which are to draw the human chariot which necessarily 

 forms such a long and painful process of human evolution. The old 

 moral codes are a part of this process; but they go on the plan of extinguish- 

 ing some of the passions seeing that it is sometimes easier to shoot a 

 restive horse than to ride him. We however do not want to be lords of 

 dead carrion but of living powers; and every steed that we can add to our 

 chariot makes our progress through creation so much the more splendid, 

 providing Phoebus indeed holds the reins, and not the incapable Phaeton. 



And by becoming thus one with the social self, the individual instead 

 of being crushed is made far vaster, far grander than before. The renun- 

 ciation (if it must be so called) which he has to accept in abandoning 

 merely individual ends is immediately compensated by the far more vivid 

 life he now enters into. For every force of his nature can now be ultilised. 

 Planting himself out by contrast, he stands all the firmer because he has a 

 left foot as well as a right, and when he acts, he acts not half-heartedly as 

 one afraid, but, as it were, with the whole weight of Humanity behind 

 him. In abandoning his exclusive individuality he becomes for the first 

 time a real and living individual; and in accepting as his own the life of 

 others he becomes aware of a life in himself that has no limit and no end. 

 That the self of any one man is capable of an infinite gradation from the 

 most petty and exclusive existence to the most magnificent and inclusive 

 seems almost a truism. The one extreme is disease and death, the other 

 is life everlasting When the tongue for example which is a member of 

 the body regards itself as a purely separate existence for itself alone, it 



