once.
For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers
together, and have found it essential to organize our thieving, as we have found
it necessary to organize our lust and our revenge. Property, marriage, the law;
as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him
who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.
    But to return. Even in England a man on board a ship with yellow fever is
held responsible for his mischance, no matter what his being kept in quarantine
may cost him. He may catch the fever and die; we cannot help it; he must take
his chance as other people do; but surely it would be desperate unkindness to
add contumely to our self-protection, unless, indeed, we believe that contumely
is one of our best means of self-protection. Again, take the case of maniacs. We
say that they are irresponsible for their actions, but we take good care, or
ought to take good care, that they shall answer to us for their insanity, and we
imprison them in what we call an asylum (that modern sanctuary!) if we do not
like their answers. This is a strange kind of irresponsibility. What we ought to
say is that we can afford to be satisfied with a less satisfactory answer from a
lunatic than from one who is not mad because lunacy is less infectious than
crime.
    We kill a serpent if we go in danger by it, simply for being such and such a
serpent in such and such a place; but we never say that the serpent has only
itself to blame for not having been a harmless creature. Its crime is that of
being the thing which it is; but this is a capital offence, and we are right in
killing it out of the way, unless we think it more danger to do so than to let
it escape; nevertheless we pity the creature, even though we kill it.
    But in the case of him whose trial I have described above, it was impossible
that anyone in the court should not have known that it was but by an accident of
birth and circumstances that he was not himself also in a consumption; and yet
none thought that it disgraced them to hear the judge give vent to the most
cruel truisms about him. The judge himself was a kind and thoughtful person. He
was a man of magnificent and benign presence. He was evidently of an iron
constitution, and his face wore an expression of the maturest wisdom and
experience; yet for