It is an established social convention (in England) that it is immoral to steal or to defraud. Only in very extreme cases do we account these pursuits as evidences of mania; for though injustice and dishonesty are incompatible with the health of society, and thus actually unreasonable and indirectly suicidal, the desires which prompt men to them are only at worst exaggerations of the desire for wealth or subsistence, which everyone recognizes as a necessary condition of the mere continuance of life. Nay, where the alternative is death for lack of subsistence, many consider that neither are immoral. At the other extreme, when the instinct prompts aggression in defiance of the conscious reason and without assignable purpose of gain, when Jean Valjean robs the little Savoyard, or a noble earl pockets the sugar-tongs, we speak of mental aberration or of kleptomania. The case of self-defence is similar. Quarrelsomeness and violence are destructive of social existence, or at best impede its higher elaboration. But readiness of resentment and quickness of fist were for ages and ages necessities for individual survival; and for ages and ages more their kindred social qualities or spirit and valor were necessary for social survival, and accordingly ranked as virtues. The instruction to turn the other cheek to the smiter is even now, perhaps, an exaggeration of the precept commendable to Socialists when charged by the London police: to suffer one’s self to be killed without reason is clearly and unmistakably immoral. As the western world advances out of warfare into industry, more and more of what was once military virtue becomes immorality in the individual; until an habitual ferocity which might once have qualified its subject for chieftainship may nowadays consign him to penal servitude or Bedlam.