Even more directly, the narrator writes that "the way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds" (60). The narrator gestures toward this mixing of personal and more broadly social motives in observing that "in their own way the most ardent of revolutionaries are perhaps doing no more but seeking for peace in common with the rest of mankind" (61). When the Assistant Commissioner weighs whether or not prosecute Michaelis, he worries that the effect of doing so will be that his wife's friend, Michaelis's patroness, will be upset with him (83). The Professor seeks to be dangerous socially so that he personally can acquire prestige and respect from others. But in practice, what is ultimately at stake for most of them is a variety of personal preoccupations. On the surface, the major motivation for many of the characters is to bring about a transformation in the way society is organized. Effectively, either the narrator or the characters themselves see different persons as types, the diverse distillations of particular conventions that make up society and form the basis of its essential conflicts. For him the plain duty is to fasten the guilt upon as many prominent anarchists as he can on some slight indications he had picked up in the course of his investigation on the spot whereas I, he would say, am bent upon vindicating their innocence" (104). My line of inquiry would appear to him an awful perversion of duty. In a different way, the Assistant Commissioner says of Chief Inspector Heat: "He is an old departmental hand They have their own morality.
Many other conventions easier to set aside, alas! failed to obtain her recognition, also on temperamental grounds-either because they bored her, or else because they stood in the way of her scorns and sympathies" (77). For example, the narrator tells us of the Michaelis' patroness: "Old now in the number of her years, she had that sort of exceptional temperament which defies time with scornful disregard, as if it were a rather vulgar convention submitted to by the mass of inferior mankind. All of the characters with deep social involvements, whether professional or personal, must deal with the stringent rule of convention in society.
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