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; 136 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 137 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.
