any shape and at any sacrifice.

Thus is it with us all. Left to ourselves, or surrounded only by the
scrub of humanity, we become outwardly that which the spirit within
would fashion us to, but, placed among our fellows, shackled by custom,
restrained by law, pruned and bent by the force of public opinion, we
grow as like one to another as the fruit bushes on a garden wall. The
sharp angles of our characters are fretted away by the friction of the
crowd, and we become round, polished, and, superficially, at any rate,
identical. We no longer resemble a solitary boulder on a plain, but are
as a worked stone built into the great edifice of civilised society.

The place of a man like Frank Muller is at the junction of the waters
of civilisation and barbarism. Too civilised to possess those savage
virtues which, such as they are, represent the quantum of innate good
Nature has thought fit to allow in the mixture, Man; and too barbarous
to be subject to the tenderer constraints of cultivated society, he is
at once strong in the strength of both and weak in their weaknesses.
Animated by the spirit of barbarism, Superstition; and almost entirely
destitute of the spirit of civilisation, Mercy, he stands on the edge of
both and an affront to both, as terrific a moral spectacle as the world
can afford.

Had he been a little more civilised, with his power of evil trained by
education and cynical reflection to defy the attacks of those spasms of
unreasoning spiritual terror and unrestrainable passion that have their
natural dwelling-place in the raw strong mind of uncultivated man, Frank
Muller might have broken upon the world as a Napoleon. Had he been a
little more savage, a little farther removed from the unconscious
but present influence of a progressive race, he might have ground his
fellows down and ruthlessly destroyed them in the madness of his rage
and lust, like an Attila or a T'Chaka. As it was he was buffeted between
two forces he did not realise, even when they swayed him, and thus at
every step in his path towards a supremacy of evil an unseen power made
stumbling-blocks of weaknesses which, if that path had been laid along
a little higher or a little lower level in the scale of circumstances,
would themselves have been deadly weapons of overmastering force.

See him as, with his dark heart filled up with fears, he thunders along
from that scene of midnight death and murder which his brain had not
feared to plan a