with
adored members of the opposite sex, and who even countenance La
Rochefoucauld's remark that very few people would ever imagine
themselves in love if they had never read anything about it, are
gravely declared to be abnormal or physically defective by critics of
crushing unadventurousness and domestication. French authors of saintly
temperament are forced to include in their retinue countesses of ardent
complexion with whom they are supposed to live in sin. Sentimental
controversies on the subject are endless; but they are useless, because
nobody tells the truth. Rousseau did it by an extraordinary effort,
aided by a superhuman faculty for human natural history, but the result
was curiously disconcerting because, though the facts were so
conventionally shocking that people felt that they ought to matter a
great deal, they actually mattered very little. And even at that
everybody pretends not to believe him.

ARTIFICIAL RETRIBUTION.

The worst of that is that busybodies with perhaps rather more than a
normal taste for mischief are continually trying to make negligible
things matter as much in fact as they do in convention by deliberately
inflicting injuries--sometimes atrocious injuries--on the parties
concerned. Few people have any knowledge of the savage punishments that
are legally inflicted for aberrations and absurdities to which no
sanely instructed community would call any attention. We create an
artificial morality, and consequently an artificial conscience, by
manufacturing disastrous consequences for events which, left to
themselves, would do very little harm (sometimes not any) and be
forgotten in a few days.

But the artificial morality is not therefore to be condemned offhand.
In many cases it may save mischief instead of making it: for example,
though the hanging of a murderer is the duplication of a murder, yet it
may be less murderous than leaving the matter to be settled by blood
feud or vendetta. As long as human nature insists on revenge, the
official organization and satisfaction of revenge by the State may be
also its minimization. The mischief begins when the official revenge
persists after the passion it satisfies has died out of the race.
Stoning a woman to death in the east because she has ventured to marry
again after being deserted by her husband may be more merciful than
allowing her to be mobbed to death; but the official stoning or burning
of an adulteress in the west would be an