ON HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY. St) 
expects everybody else to do his duty—in the sense of de- 
manding it. 
And that I think really is a good argument for responsi- 
bility. “Securus judicat Orbis” when the whole world is 
agreed except those who have a plain interest in dissenting. 
It will be time enough to discuss non-responsibility as a 
practical question when we find any civilised nation or 
society dealing with its subjects or members on that footing. 
That has nothing to do with the particular things which the 
particular society may regard as crimes, and they might con- 
ceivably be quite opposite in different nations, or the same, 
as indeed they are in religious matters, and even the most 
glaring crimes are sometimes pronounced virtues for political 
objects or trade unionism. I suppose there is not, nor ever 
has been, a nation without punishments, and punishment 
ipso facto means responsibility. 
So that the only open question is not about responsibility 
in this world, which is the very foundation of all society 
above the merest barbarism, but responsibility im another 
world. And here the difficulty of proceeding is that by 
“another world” everybody at once understands one where 
the virtuous and wicked will be .treated differently, and 
therefore the argument becomes whether there will be 
another life or not. All ar guments on that are so Immeasur- 
ably short of the evidence of revelation that they are hardly 
worth discussing, except perhaps to answer new objections. 
Apart from revelation, it can hardly be said that we have 
any more convincing reasons for believing in a future life, 
and one of punishments and rewards, than the ancients, of 
whom the most intelligent evidently had a very faint belief 
in it, or none at all. [I am not going to discuss Christian 
Beences here, and therefore all I can discuss is whether 
the modern arguments against responsibility are sufficient to 
raise any serious doubt about it, and, as the more practical 
issue, to furnish any rational excuse to those who wish to 
act as if future responsibility were disproved. For if an 
honest examination of the probabilities leave the conclusion 
only doubtful, no man of sense would run such a tremendous 
risk as he must know that it is to act as he pleases on the 
mere chance that he may escape all consequence of doing 
things which the vast majority of mankind agree are wrong, 
whether they acknowledge divine laws or not, merely be- 
cause he sees some present advantage in doing so. 
I remember a Judge answering an offender who pleaded 
that he did not know that the particular fraud of which he 
: D2 
