ON HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY. 41 
the only two possible alternatives which I have pointed out, 
or seriously reflect that there are only those two ; and yet no 
axiom of Euclid is clearer than that, and those who reason 
in that way are mostly persons of quite intelligence enough 
to know better, and would be indignant if they were told 
that they do not know the elements of reasoning. If such 
people come to the wrong conclusion, even honestly upon the 
books they read, it was neither rational nor honest upon the 
whole transaction of choosing the books and reading them, 
and the plea of ignorance would not avail them in any 
earthly court. Why should it in the other? When a trustee, 
or any one accused of fraud, defends himself by the plea that 
he was ignorantly misled, the immediate question of the 
Judge is, Did he take all possible means of avoiding it by 
making all the proper inquiries, and not some inquiry only ? 
If he did not, he is at once declared responsible for all the 
consequences. Even if he did make them and yet acted as 
a prudent man would not, he does not escape. Such cases 
are called hard, and in a sense they often are, when the 
person’ has derived and sought no benefit to himself. And 
yet it would be harder if those who have been ruined by his 
laziness or imprudence had to suffer instead. ‘The case of 
rejecters of the doctrine of responsibility, because they prefer 
pleasing themselves, is evidently worse; for their professed 
inquiry has been biassed by their wishes as much as that of 
a trustee who had some indirect object, if only good-nature 
to somebody, in consenting to a breach of trust. However 
liberally we may interpret “He that knew not his Lord’s 
will,” we must feel sure that the alternative is to be read, 
“He that had the means of knowing his Lord’s will and did it 
not.” 
The other suggestion, that it is unjust to punish involun- 
tary offenders, and therefore incredible that they will be 
punished, requires much the same answer. We have no 
reason to doubt that the degree of genuine compulsion ou 
which any one acts wrongly will be taken into account, as 
well as his amount of genuine and involuntary ignorance. 
All such difficulties as those, amounting sometimes to impos- 
sibility for us who do not know men’s hearts, to say on which 
side of the line they really stand, do not affect the main 
question the least, and our business is not to speculate on the 
fate of individuals, but to see whether there is any rational 
ground for expecting that they will all have no fate at all, 
except annihilation. That is the question I have tried to 
throw some little light on by the only kind of reasoning which 
