or making virtue easier or more attractive. It is the
recognition how little punishment can do, that leaves men free to see
how much social prevention can do. I believe, then, that what seems to
the criminal lawyers and passionate philanthropists self-evident, is in
truth an illusion, springing from a very shallow kind of impatience,
heated in some of them by the addition of a cynical contempt for human
nature and the worth of human existence.

If people believe that the book of social or moral knowledge is now
completed, that we have turned over the last page and heard the last
word, much of the foundation of Mr. Mill's doctrine would disappear. But
those who hold this can hardly have much to congratulate themselves
upon. If it were so, and if governments were to accept the principle
that the only limits to the enforcement of the moral standard of the
majority are the narrow expediencies of each special case, without
reference to any deep and comprehensive principle covering all the
largest considerations, why, then, the society to which we ought to look
with most admiration and envy, is the Eastern Empire during the ninth
and tenth centuries, when the Byzantine system of a thorough
subordination of the spiritual power had fully consolidated itself!

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