, which
seems to have been little felt among the Athenians, has a similar
effect. The love of litigation, which is a remnant of barbarism quite
as much as a corruption of civilization, and was innate in the Athenian
people, is diminished in the new state by the imposition of severe
penalties. If persevered in, it is to be punished with death.

In the Laws murder and homicide besides being crimes, are also
pollutions. Regarded from this point of view, the estimate of such
offences is apt to depend on accidental circumstances, such as the
shedding of blood, and not on the real guilt of the offender or the
injury done to society. They are measured by the horror which they
arouse in a barbarous age. For there is a superstition in law as well as
in religion, and the feelings of a primitive age have a traditional hold
on the mass of the people. On the other hand, Plato is innocent of the
barbarity which would visit the sins of the fathers upon the children,
and he is quite aware that punishment has an eye to the future, and not
to the past. Compared with that of most European nations in the last
century his penal code, though sometimes capricious, is reasonable and
humane.

A defect in Plato's criminal jurisprudence is his remission of the
punishment when the homicide has obtained the forgiveness of the
murdered person; as if crime were a personal affair between
individuals, and not an offence against the State. There is a ridiculous
disproportion in his punishments. Because a slave may fairly receive
a blow for stealing one fig or one bunch of grapes, or a tradesman for
selling adulterated goods to the value of one drachma, it is rather
hard upon the slave that he should receive as many blows as he has taken
grapes or figs, or upon the tradesman who has sold adulterated goods
to the value of a thousand drachmas that he should receive a thousand
blows.

II. But before punishment can be inflicted at all, the legislator
must determine the nature of the voluntary and involuntary. The great
question of the freedom of the will, which in modern times has been worn
threadbare with purely abstract discussion, was approached both by Plato
and Aristotle--first, from the judicial; secondly, from the sophistical
point of view. They were puzzled by the degrees and kinds of crime; they
observed also that the law only punished hurts which are inflicted by a
voluntary agent on an involuntary patient.

In attempting to distinguish betwee