her, what the man did out of whom
he has grown--has grown, I repeat, by a physical process which he could
not check save by suicide. As well punish him for Adam's sin, for he
might as easily have prevented that, and is every whit as accountable for
it. You pity the child born, without his choice, of depraved parents.
Pity the man himself, the man of today who, by a process as inevitable as
the child's birth, has grown on the rotten stock of yesterday. Think you,
that it is not sometimes with a sense of loathing and horror unutterable,
that he feels his fresh life thus inexorably knitting itself on, growing
on, to that old stem? For, mind you well, the consciousness of the man
exists alone in the present day and moment. There alone he lives. That is
himself. The former days are his dead, for whose sins, in which he had no
part, which perchance by his choice never would have been done, he is
held to answer and do penance. And you thought, young man, that there was
such a thing as justice !"

"I can see," said Henry, after a pause, "that when half a lifetime has
intervened between a crime and its punishment, and the man has reformed,
there is a certain lack of identity. I have always thought punishments in
such cases very barbarous. I know that I should think it hard to answer
for what I may have done as a boy, twenty years ago.

"Yes," said the doctor, "flagrant cases of that sort take the general
eye, and people say that they are instances of retribution rather than
justice. The unlikeness between the extremes of life, as between the babe
and the man, the lad and the dotard, strikes every mind, and all admit
that there is not any apparent identity between these widely parted
points in the progress of a human organism. How then? How soon does
identity begin to decay, and when is it gone--in one year, five years,
ten years, twenty years, or how many? Shall we fix fifty years as the
period of a moral statute of limitation, after which punishment shall be
deemed barbarous? No, no. The gulf between the man of this instant and
the man of the last is just as impassable as that between the baby and
the man. What is past is eternally past. So far as the essence of justice
is concerned, there is no difference between one of the cases of
punishment which you called barbarous, and one in which the penalty
follows the offence within the hour. There is no way of joining the past
with the present, and there is no difference between wha