ded sense, the sanctions of conduct
may be enumerated as the physical, the legal, the social, the religious,
and the moral. Of the physical sanction familiar examples may be found
in the headache from which a man suffers after a night's debauch, the
pleasure of relaxation which awaits a well-earned holiday, the danger to
life or limb which is attendant on reckless exercise, or the glow of
constant satisfaction which rewards a healthy habit of life. These
pleasures and pains, when once experienced, exercise, for the future, an
attracting or a deterring influence, as the case may be, on the courses
of conduct with which they have respectively become associated. Thus, a
man who has once suffered from a severe headache, after a night's
drinking-bout, will be likely to exercise more discretion in future, or
the prospect of agreeable diversion, at the end of a hard day's work,
will quicken a man's efforts to execute his task.

The legal sanction is too familiar to need illustration. Without penal
laws, no society of any size could exist for a day. There are, however,
two characteristics of this sanction which it is important to point out.
One is that it works almost exclusively[1] by means of penalties.
It would be an endless and thankless business, in a society
of any size, even if it were possible, to attempt to reward the virtuous
for their consideration in not breaking the laws. The cheap, the
effective, indeed, in most cases, the only possible method is to punish
the transgressor. By a carefully devised and properly graduated system
of penalties each citizen is thus furnished with the strongest
inducement to refrain from those acts which may injure or annoy his
neighbour. Another characteristic of the legal sanction is that, though
it is professedly addressed to all citizens alike, it actually affects
the uneducated and lower classes far more than the educated and higher
classes of society. This circumstance arises partly from the fact that
persons in a comfortable position of life are under little temptation to
commit the more ordinary crimes forbidden by law, such as are theft,
assault, and the like, and partly from the fact that their education and
associations make them more amenable to the social, and, in most cases,
to the moral and religious sanctions, about to be described presently.
Few persons in what are called the higher or middle ranks of life have
any temptation to commit, say, an act of theft, and, if they