“A rich man is an honest man, no thanks to him, for he would be a double knave to cheat mankind when he had no need of it.  He has no occasion to prey upon his integrity, nor so much as to touch upon the borders of dishonesty.  Tell me of a man that is a very honest man; for he pays everybody punctually, runs into nobody’s debt, does no man any wrong; very well, what circumstances is he in?  Why, he has a good estate, a fine yearly income, and no business to do.  The Devil must have full possession of this man, if he should be a knave; for no man commits evil for the sake of it; even the Devil himself has some farther design in sinning, than barely the wicked part of it.  No man is so hardened in crimes as to commit them for the mere pleasure of the fact; there is always some vice gratified; ambition, pride, or avarice makes rich men knaves, and necessity the poor.”

This is Defoe’s excuse for his backslidings put into the mouth of Robinson Crusoe.  It might be inscribed also on the threshold of each of his fictitious biographies.  Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, Roxana, are not criminals from malice; they do not commit crimes for the mere pleasure of the fact.  They all believe that but for the force of circumstances they might have been orderly, contented, virtuous members of society.

A Colonel, a London Arab, a child of the criminal regiment, began to steal before he knew that it was not the approved way of making a livelihood.  Moll and Roxana were overreached by acts against which they were too weak to cope.  Even after they were tempted into taking the wrong turning, they did not pursue the downward road without compunction.  Many good people might say of them, “There, but for the grace of God, goes myself.”  But it was not from the point of view of a Baxter or a Bunyan that Defoe regarded them, though he credited them with many edifying reflections.  He was careful to say that he would never have written the stories of their lives, if he had not thought that they would be useful as awful examples of the effects of bad education and the indulgence of restlessness and vanity; but he enters into their ingenious shifts and successes with a joyous sympathy that would have been impossible if their reckless adventurous living by their wits had not had a strong charm for him.  We often find peeping out in Defoe’s writings that roguish cynicism which we should expect in a man whose own life was so far from being straightforward.  He was too much dependent upon the public acceptance of honest professions to be eager in depreciating the value of the article, but when he found other people protesting disinterested motives, he could not always resist reminding them that they were no more disinterested than the Jack-pudding who avowed that he cured diseases from mere love of his kind.  Having yielded to circumstances himself, and finding life enjoyable in dubious paths, he had a certain animosity against those who had maintained their integrity and kept to the highroad, and a corresponding pleasure in showing that the motives of the sinner were not after all so very different from the motives of the saint.