dragged, into the army, and suffer as the civilised must do when condemned to live among men of a type lower than their own. Men of the savage type, who are not fortunate enough to be drafted into the army, recruit the numerous ranks of the "criminal" population. Their predatory instincts lead them into conflict with a society whose normal moral standard has been evolved past the level which they have reached. It is their misfortune that they are born a few centuries too late, in a country too civilised to suit them. Eight hundred years ago, or even less, their abilities would have made them the founders of great families, and would have earned for them undying fame. Nothing can prove more clearly the relative nature of "morality", than the fact that the late Mr. Charles Peace, so unappreciated in the nineteenth century, would have made a very decent baron in the eleventh, and would have been looked back to with pride by his descendants.
III.
When once we recognise the tremendous part played by heredity in the formation of the individual, and the dependence of the moral sense on physical and mental development, the question is certain to arise: What is responsibility? How far can a person be said to be responsible for his actions, if those actions largely depend on his inherited tendencies, and on the limitations proper to his evolutionary stage?
We will at once shut out of our inquiry the idea of responsibility to God. The only responsibility with which we are here concerned is responsibility to man, i.e. to society. And we must consider (1) the responsibility to society of the individual for crime, leading to the problem of punitive action by legal tribunals, and of the duty of society towards its members; (2) the responsibility to society of the individual for sin, at the bar of public opinion.
At what stage of evolution does the responsibility of the individual begin? We can pass over the mineral and the vegetable kingdoms and travel into the animal, before we can attach any meaning at all to the word. And when we discover its germs, we find the three divisions of mind are
