believe him.


ARTIFICIAL RETRIBUTION.

The worst of that is that busybodies with perhaps rather more
than a normal taste for mischief are continually trying to make
negligible things matter as much in fact as they do in convention
by deliberately inflicting injuries--sometimes atrocious
injuries--on the parties concerned. Few people have any knowledge
of the savage punishments that are legally inflicted for
aberrations and absurdities to which no sanely instructed
community would call any attention. We create an artificial
morality, and consequently an artificial conscience, by
manufacturing disastrous consequences for events which, left to
themselves, would do very little harm (sometimes not any) and be
forgotten in a few days.

But the artificial morality is not therefore to be condemned
offhand. In many cases it may save mischief instead of making it:
for example, though the hanging of a murderer is the duplication
of a murder, yet it may be less murderous than leaving the matter
to be settled by blood feud or vendetta. As long as human nature
insists on revenge, the official organization and satisfaction of
revenge by the State may be also its minimization. The mischief
begins when the official revenge persists after the passion it
satisfies has died out of the race. Stoning a woman to death in
the east because she has ventured to marry again after being
deserted by her husband may be more merciful than allowing her to
be mobbed to death; but the official stoning or burning of an