CHAPTER X
HOLLISTER
What elements combine to make a "bad man"? Science would hold him not entirely responsible. Three-quarters of his human equation results from heredity and environment. Impure blood feeding fibers and tissues prenatally disposed to laxness, supplymg degraded nerve centers. Selfishness innate in all of us, the giving way to every evil impulse that panders to demoralized appetites, gradual accentuation of greed and lust and bullying tendency. Conditions inherited as well as physical negations, bad breeding, the faults and sins and diseases of past generations. Those, and a will unable to restrain the wild horses that tug and pull and chafe against all restraint and moderation until, given free rein at last, they run away with the driver who lashes them on, and who must, in our social order, be held primarily responsible. Human justice deals little in psychology, nor is this a brief for Hollister. Yet such congenital faults and personal follies—evil company, slack women, strong liquors, had made him the utter blackguard that he was.
He had carried off Mary Burrows to satisfy a lust composed of physical perversion and the wish to humiliate her gentility, her poise that had made
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