Page:Next-of-kin Marriages in Old Iran.djvu/117

persons which made ordinary offences no sins in them. A course of adulation and superiority to legal coercion readily breed a contempt of moral restraints. It commonly produces an inordinate pride. We might thus have a Persian prince indulging in unions like the king of Egypt and the Incas of Peru, which would, after all, be only in them the practice, or the casual excesses, of tyrants besotted with despotic power. Germany in the last century was full of royal foulness, which yet stood quite apart from the general life of the people. Unbridled lust disturbs the reason almost more than any other passion. History abounds in instances of it, and if Persian despots and their children were sometimes incestuous in their moral delirium, we should not be justified in reasoning from such instances to any custom of the people. The stories rather imply that these excesses were startling, and probably revolting, as were the tales at one time current about James the Sixth of Scotland and First of England.

If one applies to the narratives of the Greek writers the tests by which one would pronounce on the guilt or innocence of an accused, it may, I think, safely be said the evidence is insufficient. It would then surely be wrong to convict an otherwise highly moral nation, endowed with fine sensibilities, of a revolting practice, on testimony on which one would not condemn a pick-pocket.