er by public opinion and by law. Now if we take public
opinion, Mill admits, though he disputes the inference from the
admission, that a man must suffer the 'inconveniences strictly
inseparable from the unfavourable opinion of others.' But men are units,
not bundles of distinct qualities, some self-regarding, and others
'extra-regarding.' Everyone has the strongest interest in the character
of everyone else. A man alone in the world would no more be a man than a
hand without a body would be a hand.[134] We cannot therefore be
indifferent to character because accidentally manifested in ways which
do or do not directly and primarily affect others. Drunkenness, for
example, may hurt a man's health or it may make him a brute to his wife
or neglectful of his social duties. As moralists we condemn the
drunkard, not the results of his conduct, which may be this or that
according to circumstances. To regard Mill's principle as a primary
moral axiom is, therefore, contradictory. It nullifies all law, moral
or other, so far as it extends. But if Mill's admission as to the
'unfavourable opinions' is meant to obviate this conclusion, his theory
merely applies to positive law. In that case it follows that the
criminal law must be entirely divorced from morality. We shall punish
men not as wicked but as nuisances. To Fitzjames this position was
specially repulsive. His interest in the criminal law was precisely that
it is an application of morality to conduct. Make it a mere machinery
for enabling each man to go his own way, virtuous or vicious, and you
exclude precisely the element which constituted its real value. Mill,
when confronted with some applications of his theory, labours to show
that though we have no right to interfere with 'self-regarding' vice, we
may find reasons for punishing conspiracies in furtherance of vice. 'I
do not think,' replies Fitzjames, 'that the state ought to stand
bandying compliments with pimps.' It ought not to say that it can
somehow find an excuse for calling upon them to desist from 'an
experiment in living' from which it dissents. 'My feeling is that if
society gets its grip on the collar of such a fellow, it should say to
him, "You dirty fellow, it may be a question whether you should be
suffered to remain in your native filth untouched, or whether my opinion
should be printed by the lash on your bare back. That question will be
determined without the smallest reference to your wishes or feelings,