isolate the offender from his act. As the power and the self-consciousness of a community increases, so proportionately does the penal law become mitigated; conversely every weakening and jeopardising of the community revives the harshest forms of that law. The creditor has always grown more humane proportionately as he has grown more rich; finally the amount of injury he can endure without really suffering becomes the criterion of his wealth. It is possible to conceive of a society blessed with so great a consciousness of its own power as to indulge in the most aristocratic luxury of letting its wrongdoers go scot-free .⁠—“What do my parasites matter to me?” might society say. “Let them live and flourish! I am strong enough for it.”⁠—The justice which began with the maxim, “Everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off,” ends with connivance at the escape of those who cannot pay to escape⁠—it ends, like every good thing on earth, by destroying itself .⁠—The self-destruction of Justice! we know the pretty name it calls itself⁠—