The hand of civilization has lain hard upon those professions wherein
the outlaw spirit once found expression. The riproaring pirates have
been swept from the seven seas. Bandits have been chased from the
mountains. Robbers no longer infest the woods, and smugglers have
deserted the caves. About all that is left for the poor wicked man is
the gypsy bands in the country and the criminal class in the city.
Too little attention has been given to that primeval and persistent
trait of human nature, the love of outlawry. That it is in the blood of
all of us is shown by the fact that it breaks out in every boy. No boy
wants to be a banker or a grocer when he grows up; they all want to
become pirates, bandits, or circus clowns.
They are supposed to get over this as they mature, but a lot of it still
lingers under the vests of the most respectable members of society.
It is doubtful whether any human being wants to sin. What he wants is to
escape from respectability.
Few men drink liquor for the love of it. A vast deal of alcohol is
consumed just because it seems devilish. When the host tips his guest
the wink and stealthily leads the way to the back-closet under the
stairs and produces a black bottle, how the flavor of the liquor is
improved by the vicious delight in evading the watchfulness of the
members of the Women’s Temperance Society gathered in the parlor!
Few boys would learn to smoke if it were not impressed upon them that
smoking perverts their morals and brings them to an early grave. For
just the wild waywardness of doing something desperate they will sneak
behind the barn and make themselves sick with father’s pipe.
How many a marriage has gone wrong because of the irrepressible desire
of human beings to make moral excursions might be an interesting subject
for speculation. There is a cantankerous rebellion in the average human
being toward anything that is legalized, even ecstatic bliss.
The criminal class is supposed to be confined to a few low-browed
persons well known to the police. But all criminality does not lie
within this corral. There are propensities in all of us that differ but
little from those in the professional law-breaker.