f mind, which state of mind was
carefully written out in text-book editorials, and on tablets handed
down by God from a mountaintop. Men who robbed, cheated, beat their
wives, deserted their families, seduced women, shirked responsibilities,
were enemies on his own threshold. They must be punished, mentally, by
him; physically by the society to which he belonged.

The punishing of evil-doers did more than eliminate them from his
threshold. It vindicated his own virtue. Virtue increases in direct
proportion with its ability to distinguish evil. The denunciation of
evil-doers was the boasting of George Hazlitt, "I am not one of them."
The more vigorous the denunciation, the more vigorous the boast. The
hanging of a man for the crime of murder was a reward paid to George
Hazlitt for his abstinence from bloodshed. The jailing of a seducer
offered a tangible recompense for the self-denial which he, as a
non-seducer, practiced.

Apart from the satisfactions his virtue derived in establishing its
superiority by assisting spiritually in the punishment of the
unvirtuous, his rage against lawbreakers found itself equally on his
devotion to law. He perceived in the orderly streets, in the miles of
houses, in the smoothly functioning commerce and government of his day,
a triumph of man over his baser selves. The baser selves of man were
instincts that yearned for disorder. Of this triumph Hazlitt felt
himself a part.

Disorder he thought not only illegal, but debasing. The same virtue
which prevented him from promenading in his pajamas in the boulevard
stirred with a feeling of outrage against the confusion attending a
street-car strike. His intelligence, clinging like some militant
parasite to the stability of life, resented all agitations, material or
spiritual, all violators who violated the equilibrium to which he was
fastened.

Against dreamers his rage was even deeper and more a part of his fiber.
In the tick-tock of life Hazlitt saw a perfection--an evolution out of
centuries of mania and disorder. The tick-tock was a perfection whose
basic principle was a respect for others. This respect evolved out of
man's fear of man and insuring a mutual protection against his predatory
habits, was to Hazlitt a religion. He denied himself pleasures and
convenient expressions for his impulses in order to spare others
displeasure and inconvenience. And his nature demanded a similar
sacrifice of his fellows--as a reward and a symbol o