But whilst qualities like his command so much reverence and win such high rewards in other fields of activity, it would be vain to hope that our full-blooded and high-spirited youth will not see something to admire in his career.
If there are any such they will do well to remember that the grandest successes of a criminal course are at the best wretched failures.
Peace has probably had a far smoother life than most offenders of equal activity. Yet he has spent no inconsiderable part of his time in prison, and in the full noontide of his prosperity hardly reaped as much fruit from his misapplied talents as those talents would have yielded in any honest walk of life.
Thomas Carlyle, the philosopher of Chelsea, bewailing the degeneracy of the age, complains that we no longer, as in the old days, worship heroes.
To us it seems there is no lack of hero-worshippers in the nineteenth century, but that our heroes are of the wrong sort—imperial tricksters like the Third Napoleon, garotters of liberty such as Bismarck, and super-cunning criminals of whom the man who suffered on the scaffold for the murder of Arthur Dyson, at Bannercross, on the 29th of November, 1876, was a shameful example.
There are thousands of kindly, well-nurtured folk, with a taste for the marvellous, who openly proclaim their sympathy for Peace.
They tell us that every time he went out to rob, and, if necessity should arise, to murder, he carried his life in his hand: that he waged a daring and unequal war against the police and society; and that his courage, his resources, and his presence or mind in moments of the utmost danger, point him out as a man capable of greatness in a legitimate calling.
The argument is as worthless as it is spacious, for those very qualities are shared in greater degree by predatory wild beasts of the jungle. If, however, sympathy for this sort of social outlaw were confined to ladies and ladylike men, very little harm to society would ensue.
The mischief lies on another and a lower level.
It is a notorious fact that the criminal classes are themselves unduly proud of this sort of superlative villain; and if by any chance he were, at the eleventh hour, to elude the hangman, there would be much joy in many thieves’ kitchens.