ions punishment is the
indispensableness of punishment for the reparation of injury. Whoever
has suffered wrong has been subjected to invasion of some right,
personal or proprietary, and is entitled to amends for the outrage;
while the aggressor from whom the amends are due, ought to render them
because he owes them, and because he ought, may, if necessary, be
compelled, to render them. By the breach of right which he has
committed, he has forfeited his own corresponding right, which may now
be equitably set aside to whatever extent may be requisite for
reparation of the evil he has done, one essential part of such
reparation being adequate security against repetition of the wrong. So
far as may be necessary for this purpose, punishment may equitably go,
but no further. Genuine justice does not permit penal laws of human
enactment to take into account the abstract turpitude of crime. That she
reserves for divine cognisance, recollecting that 'Vengeance is mine, I
will repay,' saith the Lord. Nor does she permit the smallest
aggravation of punishment for the sake either of the offender's own
mental improvement, or to discourage others from evil doing; neither, on
the other hand, does she recognise any claim to abatement on the plea of
an offender not having been able to help acting as he did. She would
not, indeed, punish with death or with stripes an outrage committed by a
lunatic or an idiot, partly because an outrage may be really less
offensive for being committed unwittingly, inasmuch as it does not, at
any rate, add insult to injury, and also because the corporal
chastisement of a lunatic or an idiot could afford no reparation to the
wounded feelings of a healthy mind. But so far as even an idiot or a
lunatic was capable of making good the evil he had done by rendering
what had in consequence become due, Anti-utilitarianism would require
him equally with an erring saint or sage to make it, and equally, too,
would subject him to whatever restraint might be deemed not more than
sufficient to prevent his doing the same evil again. And of course she
does not treat an offender of ordinary intelligence with indulgence
which she would not show even to a lunatic, but exacts inexorably full
reparation for what he has done, requiring him commonly to pay in kind
so far as he can, and to make up with his person for any deficiency.
Within the limits thus marked out she is well content that, with the one
object which alone justif