Explore "The Man who Bought London" by Edgar Wallace on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"When a man with no great moral perceptions, with no sense of obligation to his conscience, his pride, or his humanity, finds himself thwarted of his heart's desire, his mind naturally turns to murder. Murder, indeed, is a natural instinct of man, as maternity is a natural instinct of woman. Thousands of years of civilization have called into being a super-instinct which is voluntary in application and is termed self-restraint. The wild waters of will have been directed through artificial courses, and woe to the errant stream that overleaps the bank and runs to its natural level."
So wrote Hermann Zeberlieff in his diary two nights after the sentence of his sister. It embodied his philosophy, and was one of the most interesting articles of his creed and certainly one of the most coherent passages in the diary which was read in public on a subsequent occasion, Hermann Zeberlieff being unavoidably absent.