This is a degenerate age. A couple of centuries ago Quixtus could have manned a ship with cut-throats, hoisted the skull and cross-bones, and become the Terror of the Seas. Or, at a more recent date, if he had been a Corsican he could have taken his gun and gone into the maquis and declared war on the island. If he had lived in the fourteenth century he could have become a condottiere after the fashion of the gentle Duke Guarnieri, who, wearing on his breast a silver badge with the inscription “The Enemy of God, of Pity, and of Mercy,” gained for himself enviable unpopularity in Northern Italy. As a Malay, he could have taken a queerly curving, businesslike knife and run amuck, to his great personal satisfaction. In prehistoric times, he could have sat for a couple of delicious months in a cave, polishing and sharpening a beautiful axe-head, and, having fitted it to its haft, have gone forth and (probably skulking behind trees so as to get his victims in the rear) have had as gorgeous a time as was given to prehistoric man to imagine. But nowadays, who can do these delightful, vindictive, and misanthropical things with any feeling of security? If Quixtus, obeying a logically developed impulse; had slaughtered a young man in evening dress in Piccadilly, he most indubitably would have been hung, to say nothing of being subjected to all the sordid procedure of a trial for murder. Nor is this all. Owing to some flaw in our system of education, Quixtus had not been trained to deeds of violence; no one had even set before him the theoretical philosophy of the subject. You may argue, I am aware, that we use other weapons now than the cutlass of the pirate or the stone-axe of the quaternary age; we have the subtler vengeance of voice and pen, which can give a more exquisite finish to the devastation of human lives. But I would remind you that Quixtus, through the neglect of his legal studies and practice, was ignorant of the ordinary laws of chicane, and of the elementary principles of financial dishonesty that guided the nefariousness of folk like “Gehenna, Unlimited.” It must be admitted, therefore, that Quixtus entered on his career of depravity greatly handicapped.