 been maligned unjustly.
    I do not hesitate therefore to sentence you to imprisonment, with hard
labour, for the rest of your miserable existence. During that period I would
earnestly entreat you to repent of the wrongs you have done already, and to
entirely reform the constitution of your whole body I entertain but little hope
that you will pay attention to my advice; you are already far too abandoned. Did
it rest with myself, I should add nothing in mitigation of the sentence which I
have passed, but it is the merciful provision of the law that even the most
hardened criminal shall be allowed some one of the three official remedies,
which is to be prescribed at the time of his conviction. I shall therefore order
that you receive two tablespoonfuls of castor oil daily, until the pleasure of
the court be further known.«
    When the sentence was concluded the prisoner acknowledged in a few scarcely
audible words that he was justly punished, and that he had had a fair trial. He
was then removed to the prison from which he was never to return. There was a
second attempt at applause when the judge had finished speaking, but as before
it was at once repressed; and though the feeling of the court was strongly
against the prisoner, there was no show of any violence against him, if one may
except a little hooting from the bystanders when he was being removed in the
prisoners' van. Indeed, nothing struck me more during my whole sojourn in the
country, than the general respect for law and order.
 

                                 Chapter Twelve

                                  Malcontents

I confess that I felt rather unhappy when I got home, and thought more closely
over the trial that I had just witnessed. For the time I was carried away by the
opinion of those among whom I was. They had no misgivings about what they were
doing. There did not seem to be a person in the whole court who had the smallest
doubt but that all was exactly as it should be. This universal unsuspecting
confidence was imparted by sympathy to myself, in spite of all my training in
opinions so widely different. So it is with most of us; that which we observe to
be taken as a matter of course by those around us, we take as a matter of course
ourselves. And after all, it is our duty to do this, save upon grave occasion.
    But when I was alone, and began to think the trial over, it certainly did
strike me as betraying a strange and untenable position. Had the judge said that
he acknowledged the probable truth, namely, that the prisoner was born of
unhealthy parents, or had
