Chapter III

. of the preceding Essay, on "The Freedom of the Will."[10] It is true that among convicts the young have a large majority; but this is because, when a tendency to crime exists in the character, it soon finds a way of expressing itself in acts, and of reaching its goal--the galleys, or the gibbet; while he, whom all the inducements to wrong doing, which a long life offers, have failed to lead astray, is not likely to fall at the eleventh hour. Hence the respect paid to age is, in my opinion, due to the fact that the old are considered to have passed through a test of sixty or seventy years, and kept their integrity unsullied; for this of course is the _sine qua non_ of the honour accorded them. These things are too well known for any one, in real life, to be misled by the promises of the moralists we have spoken of. He who has once been proved guilty of evil-doing, is never again trusted, just as the noble nature, of which a man has once given evidence, is always confidently believed in, whatever else may have changed. _Operari sequitur esse_ (what one does follows from what one is) forms, as we have seen in Part II.,