us, whether we will it or not, into our present position of seeking still further change.
Modern civilised society has been developed by the antagonism between individual and social interests, between the holding of property in severalty and in common; and between the simple and limited kinship group, and the complex and extended political whole, or impersonal state, which has transformed primitive society into civilisation.
The difference between these opposing circumstances of society is, in fact, that between an organism and a mechanism. The earlier condition in which everything, art, science (so far as it went), law, industry, were personal, and aspects of a living body, is opposed to the civilised condition in which all these elements have become mechanical, uniting to build up mechanical life, and themselves the product of machines material and moral.
That all our industry and art is produced by a system of machinery is a fact too obvious to need enlarging on in this 22 place.12 But it may not be so clear to many that the system is dominant over other departments of human life; for instance, the blood-feud and the weregild were the foundation of early or "customary” criminal law: the penalty of the offender being rather negative than positive. In customary law the protection of society was withdrawn from the offender: in political law, society itself delegates certain men, who, without having any personal or social relations to the criminal or his victim, have to undertake his punishment, that is, to injure him by a mechanical procedure, so that the offender, instead of being a person excluded from the benefits of society, and merely ignored by it, has become an enemy with whose destruction, or existence in a mutilated condition society must charge itself.
The machine of criminal law is first set in motion by the police: the judge gives the law to the jury as a hard and fast mechanical rule, on that rule