vice, quite apart from any benefit that may be in the result. No
adherent of the doctrine of necessity in morals can justify that
attitude. The assassin could no more avoid the murder he committed than
could the dagger. Justice opposes any suffering, which is not attended
by benefit. Resentment against vice will not excuse useless torture. We
must banish the conception of desert. To punish for what is past and
irrecoverable must be ranked among the most baleful conceptions of
barbarism. Xerxes was not more unreasonable when he lashed the waves of
the sea, than that man would be who inflicted suffering on his fellow
from a view to the past and not from a view to the future.

Excluding all idea of punishment in the proper sense of the word, it
remains only to consider such coercion as is used against persons
convicted of injurious action in the past, for the purpose of preventing
future mischief. Godwin now invites us to consider the futility of
coercion as a means of reforming, or as he would say, "enlightening the
understanding" of a man who has erred. Our aim is to bring him to the
acceptance of our conception of duty. Assuming that we possess more of
eternal justice than he, do we shrink from setting our wit against his?
Instead of acting as his preceptor we become his tyrant. Coercion first
annihilates the understanding of its victim, and then of him who adopts
it. Dressed in the supine prerogatives of a master, he is excused from
cultivating the faculties of a man. Coercion begins by producing pain,
by violently alienating the mind from the truth with which we wish it to
be impressed. It includes a tacit confession of imbecility.

With some hesitation Godwin allows the use of force to restrain a man
found in actual violence. We may not have time to reason with him. But
even for self-defence there are other resources. "The powers of the mind
are yet unfathomed." He tells the story of Marius, who overawed the
soldier sent into his cell to execute him, with the words, "Wretch, have
you the temerity to kill Marius?" Were we all accustomed to place an
intrepid confidence in the unaided energy of the intellect, to despise
force in others and to refuse to employ it ourselves, who shall say how
far the species might be improved? But punitive coercion deals only with
a man whose violence is over. The only rational excuse for it is to
restrain a man from further violence which he will presumably commit.
Godwin condemns capi