and therefore less confident and more
indulgent in our judgments of others. There are men whose cards in life
are so bad, whose temptations to vice, either from circumstances or
inborn character, seem so overwhelming, that, though we may punish, and
in a certain sense blame, we can scarcely look on them as more
responsible than some noxious wild beast. Among the terrible facts of
life none is indeed more terrible than this. Every believer in the wise
government of the world must have sometimes realised with a crushing or
at least a staggering force the appalling injustices of life as shown in
the enormous differences in the distribution of unmerited happiness and
misery. But the disparity of moral circumstances is not less. It has
shaken the faith of many. It has even led some to dream of a possible
Heaven for the vicious where those who are born into the world with a
physical constitution rendering them fierce or cruel, or sensual, or
cowardly, may be freed from the nature which was the cause of their
vice and their suffering upon earth; where due allowance may be made for
the differences of circumstances which have plunged one man deeper and
ever deeper into crime, and enabled another, who was not really better
or worse, to pass through life with no serious blemish, and to rise
higher and higher in the moral scale.

Imperfect, however, as is our power of judging others, it is a power we
are all obliged to exercise. It is impossible to exclude the
considerations of moral guilt and of palliating or aggravating
circumstances from the penal code, and from the administration of
justice, though it cannot be too clearly maintained that the criminal
code is not coextensive with the moral code, and that many things which
are profoundly immoral lie beyond its scope. On the whole it should be
as much as possible confined to acts by which men directly injure
others. In the case of adult men, private vices, vices by which no one
is directly affected, except by his own free will, and in which the
elements of force or fraud are not present, should not be brought within
its range. This ideal, it is true, cannot be fully attained. The
legislator must take into account the strong pressure of public opinion.
It is sometimes true that a penal law may arrest, restrict, or prevent
the revival of some private vice without producing any countervailing
evil. But the presumption is against all laws which punish the voluntary
acts of adult men