This is as true of its criminal as of its civil branches.
Its concern is with society rather than the individual, and it
sacrifices the individual to society without compunction, applying one
rule to all alike, with a view to social, not individual, results, on
the broad scale. Those matters which make individual justice
impossible,--especially the element of personal responsibility in
wrong-doing, how the man came to be what he is and his susceptibility to
motives, to reason and to passion, in their varieties, and all such
considerations,--law ignores in the main question, however it may admit
them in the imperfect form in which only they can be known, as
circumstances in extenuation or aggravation. This large part of
responsibility, it will seem to every reflective moralist, enters little
into the law's survey; and its penalties, at best, are "the rack of
this rude world." Death and imprisonment, as it inflicts them, are for
the protection of society, not for reformation, though the philanthropic
element in the State may use the period of imprisonment with a view to
reformation; nor in the history of the punishment of crime, of the
vengeance as such taken on men in addition to the social protection
sought, has society on the whole been less brutal in its repulse of its
enemies than they were in their attack, or shown any eminent justice
toward its victims in the sphere of their own lives.
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