ates the penal code and
makes the reclamation of the criminal a main object is a perfectly
right thing as long as it does not so far diminish the deterrent power
of punishment as to increase crime, and as long as it does not place the
criminal in a better position of comfort than the blameless poor, but
when these conditions are not fulfilled it is much more an evil than a
good. The remote, indirect and unrealised consequences of our acts are
often far more important than those which are manifest and direct, and
it continually happens that in extirpating some concentrated and
obtrusive evil, men increase or engender a diffused malady which
operates over a far wider area. How few, for example, who share the
prevailing tendency to deal with every evil that appears in Society by
coercive legislation adequately realise the danger of weakening the
robust, self-reliant, resourceful habits on which the happiness of
Society so largely depends, and at the same time, by multiplying the
functions and therefore increasing the expenses of government, throwing
new and crushing burdens on struggling industry! How often have
philanthropists, through a genuine interest for some suffering class or
people, advocated measures which by kindling, prolonging, or enlarging a
great war would infallibly create calamities far greater than those
which they would redress! How often might great outbursts of savage
crime or grave and lasting disorders in the State, or international
conflicts that have cost thousands of lives, have been averted by a
prompt and unflinching severity from which an ill-judged humanity
recoiled! If in the February of 1848 Louis Philippe had permitted
Marshal Bugeaud to fire on the Revolutionary mob at a time when there
was no real and widespread desire for revolution in France, how many
bloody pages of French and European history might have been spared!

Measures guaranteeing men, and still more women, from excessive labour,
and surrounding them with costly sanitary precautions, may easily, if
they are injudiciously framed, so handicap a sex or a people in the
competition of industry as to drive them out of great fields of
industry, restrict their means of livelihood, lower their standard of
wages and comfort, and thus seriously diminish the happiness of their
lives. Injudicious suppressions of amusements that are not wholly good,
but which afford keen enjoyment to great masses, seldom fail to give an
impulse to other plea