The case of murders, however, differs from the foregoing in one important particular.  The persons who are detected in the commission of this crime are commonly, by their punishment, withdrawn from the number of active criminals; and consequently the average is kept up, not by the same persons, but in part by different ones.  Here is, therefore, more appearance of the mediation of compulsory social law; and indeed the action of social forces in the case I am far more disposed to assert than to question.  What we are to inquire, however, is not whether social forces contribute to this result, but whether they are such forces as supersede and annihilate individual will.  Let us see.

All men are liable to collisions of passion and interest with their neighbors and contemporaries.  All desire to remove the obstructions thus opposed.  All would labor for this end with brute directness, that is, by lawless violence and cunning, were it not for the rational and moral elements in their nature, which suggest noble pieces of abstinence and self-restraint, thus securing a certain freedom, a certain superiority to the brute pressure of interest and impulse.  These rational and moral elements are in variable counterpoise with the ruder desires,—­sometimes commanding them with imperial ease, sometimes overcoming them by struggle, sometimes striving with them feebly and vainly, or even ceasing to strive.

Suppose, now, a nation of thirty millions.  Of these, twenty-nine millions, let us say, are never consciously tempted to commit a felony.  Why?  For want of opportunity?  Not at all; good men, whom the police do not watch, have more opportunities for crime than those whose character causes them to be suspected.  Is it because wrathful passion, the love of money, and other incentives to aggression are unknown to them?  To none are they wholly unknown.  Why, then, this immunity from temptation?  Simply because their choices, or characters,—­for character is but structural choice,—­run in favor of just and prudent courses with a tide so steady and strong as to fill all the river-beds of action, and leave no room for worse currents.  In other words, the elements that make men free hold, in this respect, easy sovereignty In their souls.  Below these millions, suppose nine hundred thousand who might be open to such temptation, but for the influence of good customs, which are the legacies left by good men dead, and kept in force by the influence of just men who are living.  In these, the freedom-making elements still keep the throne, and preserve regal sway; but they are like sovereigns who might be dethroned, but for the countenance of more powerful neighbors.  Below these, the liability to actual commission of violence begins to open; but there are, we will suppose, ninety thousand in whom it is practically suppressed by the dangers which, in civilized communities, attend upon crime.  These men have that in them which might make them felons, but for penal laws,