166 ETHICAL ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 



manifestations often offend deeply against the principle of 

 equality that it requires to be directed and kept within 

 limits by public justice. The acts by which revenge is 

 gratified are commonly of a kind, and may be accompanied 

 by an excess of cruelty, which, by themselves, and before 

 the motives are ascertained, arouse the liveliest moral 

 repulsion. When the whole circumstances are known, 

 the moral feeling undergoes a change, and it then approves 

 of a penalty which is not out of all proportion to the provo 

 cation. The joint product of the two impulses revenge and 

 equality is retaliation, or a just revenge, and all retribution 

 which exceeds or falls below this standard is morally 

 offensive. In this way it is required of criminal justice 

 that the punishment should be as nearly as possible equal 

 to the offence ; that is to say, that the moral repulsion 

 excited by the offence should as nearly as possible be 

 counterbalanced by the moral repulsion that would be 

 excited by the penalty, if that stood alone and were not an 

 act of retribution. The principle of justice converts the 

 unrestrained and insatiable passion for revenge into the 

 semblance of a civil proceeding, in which the injury is a debt, 

 and the punishment repayment. Where the state provides 

 a machinery for the punishment of crime it is partly from 

 considerations of self-preservation, and partly because 

 the public conscience demands that private revenge 

 should be kept under control without being frustrated. 

 Both these, and each separately, constitute a moral obliga 

 tion which the state is not at liberty to disregard. 



In recent theories another purely ethical principle has been 

 put forward, namely, that punishment is justified as a means 

 to the moral improvement of the criminal. This appears 

 to confuse two questions the right to punish and the form 

 the punishment should take. That, after a man has for 

 feited his liberty, it is the duty of the state to provide that 

 a further deterioration of his moral character should not 

 be one of the incidents of his punishment, is a principle which 

 will be endorsed by every one. Not even the rack nor the 

 bed of Procrustes would excite as certainly the reprobation 



