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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 XII: 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 been starved in infancy, or had met
with some accidents which had developed consumption; and had he then gone
on to say that though he knew all this, and bitterly regretted that the
protection of society obliged him to inflict additional pain on one who
had suffered so much already, yet that there was no help for it, I could
have understood the position, however mistaken I might have thought it.
The judge was fully persuaded that the infliction of pain upon the weak
and sickly was the only means of preventing weakness and sickliness from
spreading, and that ten times the suffering now inflicted upon the
accused was eventually warded off from others by the present apparent
severity. I could therefore perfectly understand his inflicting whatever
pain he might consider necessary in order to prevent so bad an example
from spreading further and lowering the Erewhonian standard; but it
seemed almost childish to tell the prisoner that he could have been in
good health, if he had been more fortunate in his constitution, and been
exposed to less hardships when he was a boy.

I write with great diffidence, but it seems to me that there is no
unfairness in punishing people for their misfortunes, or rewarding them
for their sheer good luck: it is the normal condition of human life that
this should be done, and no right-minded person will complain of being
subjected to the common treatment. There is no alternative open to us.
It is idle to say that men are not responsible for their misfortunes.
What is responsibility? Surely to be responsible means to be liable to
have to give an answer should it be demanded, and all things which live
are responsible for their lives and actions should society see fit to

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