The industrial revolution greatly expanded opportunities to become wealthy, but not all opportunities were “legitimate.” Most writers emphasize that the context, or social structure, in which laws are framed make aspects of commercial behavior “illegal” or “criminal.” The context is an imposed evaluation of modes of behavior and action based on conflict resolution. This generalization has merit and, irrespective of ideological nuance, neatly packages the process through which social interest is said to attain legislative legitimacy. Such achieved legitimacy is, however, sometimes challenged, notwithstanding the participation of the challengers themselves in the process of formulation. The letter as well as the spirit of laws may be ignored, and illegal activities may flourish. These white-collar crimes—offenses against property committed by persons of “respectability and high social status”—tend to be ascribed to individual greed and opportunities created by weaknesses in the enforcement of the laws. Businessmen are damned by implication, and the solution usually recommended is more consultation, more laws, and better enforcement. Recent studies of the increasing incidence of such crimes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have adopted this interpretation to criticize the new entrepreneurial culture. Complaints have been directed particularly at a “chaotic” banking system that abetted supposedly widespread speculation and fraud during and following the Napoleonic wars. Proofs of misconduct rest on contemporary calls to curb the extravagances of entrepreneurs and private bankers, on references to repeated financial crises, on a few famous cases of fraud and robbery, and on a more general indictment culled from literature's many mustache-twirling villains.

During the Victorian period the link between Irish immigration, crime, and disorder in England was widely regarded by contemporary observers as axiomatic. In 1836 the Report on the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain devoted four pages to the examination of Irish criminality, noting that “the Irish in the larger towns of Lancashire commit more crimes than an equal number of natives of the same places,” and in 1839 the Report of the Constabulary Commissioners observed that in the towns of South Lancashire, “when large bodies of Irish of less orderly habits, and far more prone to the use of violence in fits of intoxication settled permanently in these towns, the existing police force, which was sufficient to repress crime and disorders among a purely English population, has been found, under these altered circumstances, inadequate to the regular enforcement of the law.”

The belief that the Irish in England were the harbingers of crime was by no means novel. With the substantial increase in Irish immigration during the early Victorian period, the host society's widespread belief in the innate criminality of the Irish—and, more particularly, of the Irish poor—formed an integral component of the negative side of the Irish stereotype. Witness, for example, Thomas Carlyle's much-quoted view that “in his squalor and unreason, in his falsity and drunken violence” the Irishman constituted “the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder,” or Henry Mayhew's assertion that “as a body, moreover, the habitual criminals of London are said to be, in nine cases out of ten, ‘Irish Cockneys,’ that is, persons born of Irish parents in the Metropolis.”

The nuclear age opened in prayer:

Thus did United States Army Chaplain William B. Downey bless the anxious crew of the Enola Gay in the quiet, early hours of 6 August 1945. After the aircraft's successful mission and return to the tiny island of Tinian, both President Harry Truman and former Prime Minister Winston Churchill ended their official announcements of the “mastery” of nuclear power and the destruction of Hiroshima with their own benedictions. To Truman, preoccupied with the imminent close of the war, the chief blessings to be offered were strategic: “We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.” For Churchill, now uncomprehendingly in political opposition, the appropriate prayers were far more ambiguous: