that good which you have a right to maintain and reserve to yourself.
It is then no act of authority that you perform, but the dealing of
one private person with another. Indeed, the party stopped is hardly
regarded as a person: no account is taken of his demerits: he is
regarded simply as an abridger and diminisher of what you have a right
to preserve intact. You stop a man as you stop a horse, only with more
regard to _the moderation of a blameless self-defence_, not using more
violence than is necessary here and now to preserve what you have to
preserve.

4. The stopping, unfortunately, has often to be done in a hurry: there
is no time to wait: for the next moment, unless you act promptly, it
will be all too late, or all to no purpose, to act at all. Being done
in a hurry, it has to be done in a rough-and-ready way, with such
instruments as are to hand: you cannot afford to be nice about the
means, carefully purifying them, and shaking off the dust of
objectionable circumstances. Now to stop a man in mid career all on a
sudden, to render him powerless where he was about to strike,
motionless in the direction whither he was about to go, and that in an
instant, is of common necessity a rude treatment, very dangerous to
him who experiences it, and under some conceivable circumstances
hopelessly fatal. Still the fatality--in plain words, the death of the
aggressor--is not _directly willed_. It is neither _intended_ as an
_end_, nor _chosen_ as a _means to an end_. It is not welcomed as an
end and desirable consummation: on the contrary, it is put up with
most reluctantly as coming from your act: for you, a private
individual, have no right to will and effect the death of any man,
however guilty, as will be proved hereafter. It is not chosen as a
means: for, formally as his death, it is no means to your end, which
was the averting of all present danger to your right. For that it was