It is clear that all such cases affecting morals are not only altered by circumstances, and by consideration of the psychic state of the individual, but that in regard to them different sections of the community hold widely different views. The sanctions of the criminal law to be firm and unshakeable must be capable of literal interpretation and of unfailing execution, and in that interpretation and execution be accepted as just by the whole community. But as soon as law enters the sphere of morals this becomes impossible; law loses all its certainty and all the reverence that rightly belongs to it. It no longer voices the conscience of the whole community; it tends to be merely an expression of the feelings of a small upper-class social circle; the feelings and the habits and the necessities of the mass of the population are altogether ignored.
4 Nor are such legislative incursions into the sphere of morals any more satisfactory from the point of view of the class which is responsible for them. It very soon begins to be felt that, as Hagen puts it, "the formulas of penal law are stiff and clumsy instruments which can only in the rarest instance serve to disentangle the delicate and manifoldly interwoven threads of the human soul, and decide what is just and what unjust. Formulas are adopted for simple, uncomplicated, rough everyday cases. Only in such cases do they achieve the conquest of justice over injustice."
It is true that no sharp line divides criminal acts from merely immoral acts, and the latter tend to be indirectly, even when not directly, anti-social. It would be highly convenient if we could draw a sharp distinction between major anti-social acts, which may properly be described as "crime," and justly be pursued with the full rigour of the law, and minor anti-social acts, which may be left to the varying reaction of the social environments since they cannot properly be visited by the criminal law.5