but apparently in a hundred cases within a brief period, a husband had poisoned his wife or vice versa, or both had joined in poisoning their children, or in torturing them slowly to death by starving and ill-treating them, with no other object than to get the money for burying them which they had insured in the Burial Clubs against their death.  For this purpose a child was often insured in several, even in as many as twenty clubs at once.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Cf. The Times, 20th, 22nd and 23rd Sept., 1848, and also 12th Dec., 1853.]

Details of this character belong, indeed, to the blackest pages in the criminal records of humanity.  But, when all is said, it is the inward and innate character of man, this god par excellence of the Pantheists, from which they and everything like them proceed.  In every man there dwells, first and foremost, a colossal egoism, which breaks the bounds of right and justice with the greatest freedom, as everyday life shows on a small scale, and as history on every page of it on a large.  Does not the recognised need of a balance of power in Europe, with the anxious way in which it is preserved, demonstrate that man is a beast of prey, who no sooner sees a weaker man near him than he falls upon him without fail? and does not the same hold good of the affairs of ordinary life?

But to the boundless egoism of our nature there is joined more or less in every human breast a fund of hatred, anger, envy, rancour and malice, accumulated like the venom in a serpent’s tooth, and waiting only for an opportunity of venting itself, and then, like a demon unchained, of storming and raging.  If a man has no great occasion for breaking out, he will end by taking advantage of the smallest, and by working it up into something great by the aid of his imagination; for, however small it may be, it is enough to rouse his anger—­

  Quantulacunque adeo est occasio, sufficit irae[1]—­

[Footnote 1:  Juvenal, Sat. 13, 183.]

and then he will carry it as far as he can and may.  We see this in daily life, where such outbursts are well known under the name of “venting one’s gall on something.”  It will also have been observed that if such outbursts meet with no opposition the subject of them feels decidedly the better for them afterwards.  That anger is not without its pleasure is a truth that was recorded even by Aristotle;[1] and he quotes a passage from Homer, who declares anger to be sweeter than honey.  But not in anger alone—­in hatred too, which stands to anger like a chronic to an acute disease, a man may indulge with the greatest delight: 

[Footnote 1:  Rhet., i., 11; ii., 2.]

  Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure,
  Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure[1]

[Footnote 1:  Byron Don Juan, c. xiii, 6.]