Note 22 — CRIMINALITY.

“Whenever a corner is lifted up of the veil which hides from us the primitive condition of mankind, even of such parts of it as we know to have been destined to civilisation, there are two positions, now very familiar to us, which seem to be signally falsified by all we are permitted to see—All men are brothers, and all men are equal. The scene before us is rather that which the animal world presents to the mental eye of those who have the courage to bring home to themselves the facts answering to the memorable theory of Natural Selection. Each fierce little community is perpetually at war with its neighbour, tribe with tribe, village with village. The never-ceasing attacks of the strong on the weak end in the manner expressed by the monotonous formula which so often recurs in the pages of Thucydides, ‘they put the men to the sword, the women and children they sold into slavery.’ Yet, even amid all this cruelty and carnage, we find the germs of ideas, which have spread over the world. There is still a place and a sense in which men are brothers and equals. The universal belligerency is the belligerency of one total group, tribe, or village, with another; but in the interior of the groups the regimen is one not of conflict and confusion but rather of ultra-legality. The men who composed the primitive communities believed themselves to be kinsmen in the most literal sense of the word; and surprising as it may seem, there are a multitude of indications that in one stage of thought they must have regarded themselves as equals.”22