L’Espirit de l’escalier

By Scott Horton

Having just posted on the curious ransacking of the office of Siegelman’s attorney, I just want to make clear that I am in no way suggesting that the forces involved with the Siegelman prosecution had anything to do with this or any of the other curious goings-on in Alabama. After all, we know that Karl Rove was in Hershey, Pennsylvania through the weekend.

But it is worth considering—would people who committed the sorts of crimes that went on in court all the way through the Siegelman prosecution hesitate for even a second about a petty burglary? On this point, Thomas de Quincey put it very well in his little essay Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts (1827):

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

And the next thing you know, he’ll be putting his commas outside the quotation marks. And with that, all human civilization will collapse.