rtunities of the offender?
Why do we find excuses for youth, for inexperience, for violent natural
passion, for bad education, bad example? Why, except that we feel that
all these things do affect the culpability of the guilty person, and
that it is folly and inhumanity to disregard them? But what we act upon
in private life we cannot acknowledge in our ethical theories, and
while our conduct in detail is humane and just, we have been contented
to gather our speculative philosophy out of the broad and coarse
generalisations of political necessity. In the swift haste of social
life we must indeed treat men as we find them. We have no time to make
allowances; and the graduation of punishment by the scale of guilt is a
mere impossibility. A thief is a thief in the law's eye though he has
been trained from his cradle in the kennels of St. Giles's; and definite
penalties must be attached to definite acts, the conditions of political
life not admitting of any other method of dealing with them. But it is
absurd to argue from such rude necessity that each act therefore, by
whomsoever committed, is of specific culpability. The act is one thing,
the moral guilt is another. There are many cases in which, as Butler
again allows, if we trace a sinner's history to the bottom, the guilt
attributable to himself appears to vanish altogether.

This is plain matter of fact, and as long as we continue to deny or
ignore it, there will be found men (not bad men, but men who love the
truth as much as ourselves) who will see only what we neglect, and will
insist upon it, and build their systems upon it.

And again, if less obvious, yet not less real, are those natural
tendencies which each of us brings with him into the world,--which we
did not make, and yet which almost as much determine what we are to be,
as the properties of the seed determine the tree which shall grow from
it. Men are self-willed, or violent, or obstinate, or weak, or generous,
or affectionate; there is as large difference in their dispositions as
in the features of their faces. Duties which are easy to one, another
finds difficult or impossible. It is with morals as it is with art. Two
children are taught to draw; one learns with ease, the other hardly or
never. In vain the master will show him what to do. It seems so easy: it
seems as if he had only to _will_, and the thing would be done; but it
is not so. Between the desire and the execution lies the incapable organ
wh