a sound thrashing, so it may happen that the greatest kindness which one man may be able to show to another is in thrashing him, either with his fists, or with less tangible weapons of the law.

For these reasons I hold that the old maxim "an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth," comes into no sort of collision with the Christian principle of returning good for evil.1

A farther objection to our principle is that "It makes the end aimed at by punishment too abstract. What is this principle of justice? It is a mere idea, a notion of the head, an abstraction which is all in the air. The interests of society as presented in one theory, and those of the individual criminal in the other, are at least something definite and concrete. We know what they mean, and how to go about reaching them." It is one of the curious weaknesses of this century that it has a horror of the general truths of the reason, and continually confounds them with those. intuitionless notions of the understanding, which so often manage to be mistaken for them. But those truths are far more real and practical; they come closer home to our bosoms, and even to our business, than do the interests of any institution or any individual. And this idea or principle of justice is one of those truths. It never ceases to be present in the minds and hearts of men. It is not a head-made notion; it is part of the light by which we see, rather than an object discovered in our seeing. Were it not so, those precious interests of society, which are so tangible, so practical, so definite, would soon vanish from our sight. The collision of individual selfishness, out of which some wise people have thought it possible to construct society, would prove itself a mighty social solvent in the absence of this vivifying principle, the idea of justice; just as the juices of an animal body turn to destroying acids when the vital principle has ceased to control and modify their natural action. Justice, says Plato, is of the very essence of the state; the state is such only so long and in so far as it makes justice its end. For high above all natoinal and social order, there is an order of absolute justice, and nations and societies live by compli

1This interpretation is opposed not only to that current among the Friends, but also to a similar view presented by Mr. Herbert Spencer in an article on "Our Two Religions"-if I remember the title rightly-which appeared some years ago in the Scientific Monthly; and also to the work of an anonymous author, entitled Stones Thrown at Glass Houses, or Modern Christianity a Civilized Heathenism. Anyone who interprets Christ's words in the way which He censured in the Pharisees, can get at very startling results.

ance with its conditions, or die by their violation of them. And the local, temporal and national interests, which we call social, are properly included in this larger order, and to care for it is to care equally for them. A nation, therefore, is strong and vigorous through its devotion to that principle which is higher and broader than itself; and what we need for our national vitality is the conviction of an absolute standard, to which our national life is to be conformed. The old Hebrew prophet saw that, when he had the vision of God standing in the midst of the nations, with a plumbline in his hand. You cannot cheat a plumb-line, nor distort it from the perpendicular; it is one of those facts which are almost truths, which are the perfect symbols of truths. And it is an evil sign for us if this conception of absolute justice becomes too abstract, too airy for us. Those lower social interests will be none the better off, if we loose our hold upon the universal and the eternal order of righteousness.

It may be objected that any theory of punishment which entrenches on theological grounds may easily be made a theory of persecution. I answer that persecutors always proceeded upon the utilitarian theory of punishments. They regarded the penalties they inflicted as needful either for the protection of society against heretics, or for the reformation of the heretic himself. And on their own presumptions as to the infinite and eternal importance of a right theological belief, and the danger to which society was exposed by the activity of those whom they honestly regarded as heretics, they had no choice but to persecute. Rack and stake were bad enough; but what shall we think of the more refined cruelty which left men exposed to influences whose result would be that both teacher and taught would be condemned to everlasting fire? And the deepest principle of persecution was the denial of the principle of equal retribution. The Inquisitor consigned men to rack and stake because he sincerely believed that God was Himself the greatest of all Inquisitors, and would consign by far the larger part of the human race to an endles series of tortures, compared with which rack and stake were but a trifle, and the trifle of an instant. And a great many people hold up the Inquisition to horror and scorn who hold substantially the same belief. They denounce in men what they believe of their Maker. But an intelligent conviction of the universal validity of the principle of equity, of even-handed justice, forbids the ascription of such acts to God.

And when this principle for which we are arguing is accepted by society as the basis and norm of punishment, it becomes impossible to formulate a reason for the persecution of opinion by society. On the basis of the adjustment of the punishment to the offence, it is impossible to devise a punishment for heretics.

On the other hand, let us suppose a community to be as heartily concerned about any great truth as the Middle Ages were, and as much determined on its maintenance as a pillar of social unity; what is there in any of our utilitarian theories of punishment to prevent their persecuting those who deny that truth, and disseminate their views by an open or secret propaganda? Perhaps it will be said, "The sound and utilitarian conviction that persecution is of no use. It always has failed, and it always will fail." Well did Curran say that there are more false facts in circulation than false theories; and this "failure of persecution" is one of them. As a rule, persecuted sects and parties have been destroyed by persecu tion. Look at the Donatists, the Arians of the East, the Manicheans, the Priscillianists, the Albigenses and other branches of the Kathari, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the fanatical Anabaptists of Switzerland, of southern Germany and the Austrian possessions, the Crypto-Calvinists of Saxony, and above all the Protestants of Poland, of Italy and of Spain, together with the Catholics of Sweden. Persecution has succeeded in a thousand cases; and even if it had not succeeded in a single case, still each new persecutor would set about it with the assurance that he at any rate was not destined to fail. And the currency which this false fact has attained has not prevented the rationalists of Germany and Switzerland from engaging in a great series of persecuting measures directed against Ultramontane Catholics and old-fashioned Lutherans. This Kulturkampf is significant for another reason; it shows that the absence of strong religious convictions is no guarantee against persecution. Men must believe in something; if not in a God, then in culture: and whatever they really believe in furnishes motive enough for putting down those who dissent from them. Even though it be only a belief that there is nothing about which a man can be absolutely certain, yet the Pall Mall Gazette gives us to understand that this is ground enough to go upon. Society, we are told, cannot tolerate those who are convinced of the absolute truth of their own tenets, and who teach them as something else than mere opinions! Persecution, so long monopolized by belief and

directed against unbelief, is once more, as in the days of the Cæsars and of the Reign of Terror, to be directed by unbelief against belief. So mote it be. It is in more appropriate hands now, yet it is enough to make poor old Voltaire turn over in his grave to see the new divorce between liberalism and toleration, which he had thought forever wedded by his manly devotion to the cause of intellectual liberty. Shall we live to see the Proces Calas republished by the Tract Societies, and suppressed by order of the Academies of Science as a work of unsound and dangerous tendencies?

It is not, therefore, in this direction that the danger of a renewal of the old persecuting policy is greatest. It is exactly in the opposite.

I am convinced that the old thinkers were right when they declared this principle of recompense, this lex talionis, was the right foundation of legal penalties. The blind instinct of the vengeful savage was bound up with a truth which was sound and necessary to him -a truth analogous to all that we know of the operation of natural law. That instinct found vent in wild theories about sacrifice, satisfaction, atonement. It mingled with the atrocities of pagan beliefs; it blends with highest and the most mysterious facts of the faith which superseded them. It is the righteous principle in society; it is the very foundation on which the State rests; and more than any other it explains to us what the State is, and what its majesty as the representative of the Divine Justice.

There is a mystery-with whom relation
Durst never meddle-in the soul of State;
Which hath an open action more divine
Than breath or pen can give expression to.

A. I.

ONI

A PLEA FOR THE GIRLS.

NE of the most popular, and it may be said, most exaggerated, complaints of the day is that our girls are "fast and extravagant" in their dress, ideas and manners. It is said that they are yearly becoming more extreme in their disregard of all those social and womanly qualities which were the honor and ornament of the girls of the past, and, after summing up a long train of consequent

evils to humanity in general and to the young ladies concerned in particular, the climax is capped by the declaration that this extravagance, etc., are the chief causes why so many young men remain single rather than marry girls whom they could not afford to support as wives in the extravagant style in which those girls live, and which they would naturally desire to continue even after marriage.

The popular complaint thus uttered seems plausible enough on the face of it, but as "popular opinion" seldom penetrates the depths of any subject before expressing itself very decidedly upon the surface view, and as that view is invariably as false as it is superficial, we must not be surprised if popular opinion has followed its usual course, and met with its usual gratifying success in deceiving itself, upon this subject as upon almost all others. If we would study the subject more deeply and impartially, we would learn that this outcry about the extreme "fastness and extravagance" of our girls is pure nonsense-a Minervian bug-aboo, that leaps forth polemically armed and equipped from the fertile brains of quite a numerous class of writers and speakers, who, when all other topics fail, hurl their dreaded philippics against the "female folly and extravagance" of the age as against a social Chinese wall, behind which the girls are invulnerably entrenched, laughing defiance at the stormers without. A reiteration of the charges is but "the old, old story told again," (as it has been singsung since the days when girls first began to dress and men and old women began to scold,) but as it amuses the scolds and doesn't hurt the girls, we should not, perhaps, condemn the former too harshly for indulging in their favorite and harmless recreation.

But to turn from the consideration of these social censors to the subject itself, the first point to consider is the charge that girls are relatively more extravagant in their dress to-day than they were in the past. From the earliest historical times down to the present the same general complaint has been made in every age and in every civilized community. Ignorant or forgetful of the conditions of the past, and mindful only of what we see in the present, we are too prone to exaggerate the virtues of the one and the vices of the other. "Distance lends enchantment to the view" in time as well as in space, and thus it is that those who cherish fanciful memories or false impressions of years or ages gone by are always bewailing the sin and extravagance of the present, and