“But I don’t feel the least regret. I am glad we’ve secured him and his gang. It restores a lot of plunder to the people to whom it belongs; it breaks up a very dangerous band of burglars; and it will help teach other persons of that kind how risky it is to live by law-breaking. Perhaps it will help to keep many people honest. No, I’m not sorry that we’ve been able to render so great a service to the public, and I’m not going to pretend that I am.”
“You’re right, Phil,” said Ed.
“Of course he is,” said Irv; “and as for Jim Hughes, he will get only what he deserves. If there were no laws, or if they were not enforced by the punishment of crime, there wouldn’t be much ‘show’ for honest people in this world.”
“There wouldn’t be any honest people, I reckon,” said Will, “for honest people simply couldn’t live. Everybody would have to turn savage and robber, or starve to death.”
“Yes,” said Ed. “That’s how law originated, and civilization is simply a state of existence in which there are laws enough to restrain wrong. When the savage finds that he can’t defend himself single-handed against murder and robbery, he joins with other savages for that purpose. That makes a tribe. It must have rules to govern it, and they are laws. It is out of the tribal organization that all civilized society has grown, mainly by the making of better and better laws, or by the better and better enforcement of laws already made.”
“Then are we all savages, restrained only by law from indulging in every sort of crime?” asked Phil. “I, for one, don’t feel myself to be in that condition of mind.”
“By no means,” replied the elder boy. “We are the products of habit and heredity. We have lost most of our savage instincts by having restrained them through generations, just as cows and dogs have done. You see, it is a law of nature that parents are apt to transmit their own characteristics to their children. As one of the great scientific writers puts it, ‘the habit of one generation is the instinct of the next.’ If you want a dog to hunt with, you choose one whose ancestors have been in the habit of hunting, because you know that he has inherited the habit as an instinct. Yet the highest-bred setters, pointers, and fox hounds are all descended ultimately from a common ancestry of wild dogs, as fierce, probably, as any wolf ever was. They have been for many generations under law,—the law of man’s control,—and so they have not only lost their wildness, but have acquired new instincts, new capacities, and a new intelligence.”
“I see,” said Phil, meditatively. “It is a long-continued course of timely spanking that has slowly changed us from savages into fellows able to run a flatboat and inclined to wear trousers.”
“Ah, as to that,” said Irv, “we haven’t quite got rid of our savage instincts even yet. I for one am savagely hungry for some of that beef our Cincinnati friend sent on board, and I suspect the rest of the tribe are in the same condition.”