144 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



with such spirits/' and that its monitions prevail to such 

 an extent as not only to prevent many potential burglars, 

 swindlers, and murderers, from becoming actual ones ; 

 but also that amongst actual criminals, the fear of conse- 

 quences acting in the place of a conscience, in many cases 

 turns away the current of the criminal's thought from 

 the premeditated crime ; so that the cunningly conceived 

 fraud will not be carried out, the meditated murder will 

 be only in imagination, the contemplated burglarious 

 "enterprise of great pith and moment" will remain 

 only a great idea which will never merit the name of 

 action. 



Responsibility, then, is not destroyed by the theory 

 of motives. On the contrary, a practical sense of it is 

 only to be brought home to the individual who has no 

 conscience or regard for the rights of others, by punish- 

 ment, that is, by a motive. And this punishment must, 

 in the general interest of society, be made sufficiently 

 severe to effect its proper aim of repressing crime within 

 due limits, which it can never hope by excessive severity 

 to wholly extirpate so long as the imperfect constitution 

 of society itself, as well as the imperfect constitution of 

 human nature, are two large producing causes. Punish- 

 ment by society should not be vengeance, it should not 

 be cruel or excessive, it should be tempered with a 

 judicious mercy, and allowance made where possible for 

 the pressure of temptation, for the stress of circumstance, 

 for the compulsion of actual want which sometimes 

 drives to crime. It should be remembered by society 

 that, though we know the temptation which has proved 

 too strong, we do not know how much has been success- 

 fully resisted, the amount of which, in the opinion of all 

 moralists, is a chief factor in appraising the moral worth 

 of character. Finally, it should be remembered that 



