Those cases of successful wrong-doing where a lack of group standards is involved can be understood if we take account of the network of relations in which the man lives. The view that success and morality go together supposes that he is surrounded by fairly definite and uniform standards of right kept alive by the interplay of minds in a well-knit group. This is the only guarantee that the individual will have a conscience or a self-respect which will be hurt if he transgresses these standards, or that the group will in any way punish him. But the state of things may be so anarchical that there is no well-knit, standard-making group, either to form the individual’s conscience or to punish his transgressions. This will be more or less the case in any condition of social transition and confusion, and is widely applicable to our own time. If the economic system is disintegrated by rapid changes, there will be a lack of clear sense of right and wrong relating to it, and a lack of mechanism for enforcing what sense there is: so that we need not be surprised if piratical methods in business go unpunished, and are practised by men otherwise of decent character. Beyond this an enormous amount of immorality of all kinds, in our time, may be ascribed to the unsettled condition in which people live. They become moral stragglers, not kept in line by the discipline of any intimate group. This applies not only to those whose economic life shifts from place to place, but also to those who have a stable economic function, but, like many “travelling men,” lead a shifting, irresponsible social life. It is often much the same with men of genius. The very fact that they have original impulses which they must assert against the indifference or hostility of the world about them, compels them to a certain moral isolation, and in hardening themselves against conformity they lose also the wholesome sense of customary right and wrong. So they live in a kind of anarchy which may be inseparable from their genius, but is detrimental to their character, and more or less impairs their work.