not make his own
character; his education, and the circumstances which surround him, have
made him a criminal, and for these he is not responsible. All these
opinions are extremely plausible; and so long as the question is argued
as one of justice simply, without going down to the principles which lie
under justice and are the source of its authority, I am unable to see
how any of these reasoners can be refuted. For, in truth, every one of
the three builds upon rules of justice confessedly true. The first
appeals to the acknowledged injustice of singling out an individual, and
making him a sacrifice, without his consent, for other people's benefit.
The second relies on the acknowledged justice of self-defence, and the
admitted injustice of forcing one person to conform to another's notions
of what constitutes his good. The Owenite invokes the admitted
principle, that it is unjust to punish any one for what he cannot help.
Each is triumphant so long as he is not compelled to take into
consideration any other maxims of justice than the one he has selected;
but as soon as their several maxims are brought face to face, each
disputant seems to have exactly as much to say for himself as the
others. No one of them can carry out his own notion of justice without
trampling upon another equally binding. These are difficulties; they
have always been felt to be such; and many devices have been invented to
turn rather than to overcome them. As a refuge from the last of the
three, men imagined what they called the freedom of the will; fancying
that they could not justify punishing a man whose will is in a
thoroughly hateful state, unless it be supposed to have come into that
state through no influence of anterior circumstances. To escape from the
other difficulties, a favourite contrivance has been the fiction of a
contract, whereby at some unknown period all the members of society
engaged to obey the laws, and consented to be punished for any
disobedience to them; thereby giving to their legislators the right,
which it is assumed they would not otherwise have had, of punishing
them, either for their own good or for that of society. This happy
thought was considered to get rid of the whole difficulty, and to
legitimate the infliction of punishment, in virtue of another received
maxim of justice, _volenti non fit injuria_; that is not unjust which is
done with the consent of the person who is supposed to be hurt by it. I
need hardly r