ge, "lust,
idleness, anger, hatred, revenge, these are the chief causes of crime.
These passions and desires are shared by rich and poor alike, by the
educated and uneducated. They are inherent in human nature; the germ is
in every man."

Convicts represent those wrong-doers who have taken to a particular form
of wrong-doing punishable by law. Of the larger army of bad men
they represent a minority, who have been found out in a peculiarly
unsatisfactory kind of misconduct. There are many men, some lying,
unscrupulous, dishonest, others cruel, selfish, vicious, who go through
life without ever doing anything that brings them within the scope of
the criminal code, for whose offences the laws of society provide no
punishment. And so it is with some of those heroes of history who have
been made the theme of fine writing by gifted historians.

Mr. Basil Thomson, the present head of the Criminal Investigation
Department, has said recently that a great deal of crime is due to a
spirit of "perverse adventure" on the part of the criminal. The same
might be said with equal justice of the exploits of Alexander the Great
and half the monarchs and conquerors of the world, whom we are taught
in our childhood's days to look up to as shining examples of all that a
great man should be. Because crimes are played on a great stage instead
of a small, that is no reason why our moral judgment should be suspended
or silenced. Class Machiavelli and Frederick the Great as a couple of
rascals fit to rank with Jonathan Wild, and we are getting nearer a
perception of what constitutes the real criminal. "If," said Frederick
the Great to his minister, Radziwill, "there is anything to be gained
by it, we will be honest; if deception is necessary, let us be cheats."
These are the very sentiments of Jonathan Wild.

Crime, broadly speaking, is the attempt by fraud or violence to possess
oneself of something belonging to another, and as such the cases of it
in history are as clear as those dealt with in criminal courts. Germany
to-day has been guilty of a perverse and criminal adventure, the outcome
of that false morality applied to historical transactions, of which
Carlyle's life of Frederick is a monumental example. In that book
we have a man whose instincts in more ways than one were those of a
criminal, held up for our admiration, in the same way that the same
writer fell into dithyrambic praise over a villain called Francia, a
former President of