that the result may not have been intended, but the action bringing it
about was. If a hunter shoots through a hedge and kills or wounds a
person, he did not intend to kill, and yet he is held responsible
because his first act, the shooting, was voluntary.

That statement applies to involuntary crimes, which are committed by
some positive act. But what about involuntary crimes of omission? In a
railway station, where the movements of trains represent the daily whirl
of traffic in men, things, and ideas, every switch is a delicate
instrument which may cause a derailment. The railway management places a
switchman on duty at this delicate post. But in a moment of fatigue, or
because he had to work inhumanly long hours of work, which exhausted all
his nervous elasticity, or for other reasons, the switchman forgets to
set the switch and causes a railroad accident, in which people are
killed and wounded. Can it be said that he intended the first act?
Assuredly not, for he did not intend anything and did not do anything.
The hunter who fires a shot has at least had the intention of shooting.
But the switchman did not want to forget (for in that case he would be
indirectly to blame); he has simply forgotten from sheer fatigue to do
his duty; he has had no intention whatever, and yet you hold him
responsible in spite of all that! The fundamental logic of your
reasoning in this case corresponds to the logic of the things. Does it
not happen every day in the administration of justice that the judges
forget about the neutral expedient of the legislator who devised this
relative progress of the penal code, which pretends to base the
responsibility of a man on the neutral and naive criterion of a will
without freedom of will? Do they not follow their old mental habits in
the administration of justice and apply the obsolete criterion of the
free will, which the legislator thought fit to abandon? We see, then,
as a result of this imperfect and insincere innovation in penal