The palanquin-bearers of India were too poor to pay damages, and
yet had to be [41] trusted to carry unprotected women and
children through wild and desolate tracts, where their desertion
would have placed those under their charge in great danger.

In all these cases punishment remains as an alternative. A pain
can be inflicted upon the wrong-doer, of a sort which does not
restore the injured party to his former situation, or to another
equally good, but which is inflicted for the very purpose of
causing pain. And so far as this punishment takes the place of
compensation, whether on account of the death of the person to
whom the wrong was done, the indefinite number of persons
affected, the impossibility of estimating the worth of the
suffering in money, or the poverty of the criminal, it may be
said that one of its objects is to gratify the desire for
vengeance. The prisoner pays with his body.

The statement may be made stronger still, and it may be said, not
only that the law does, but that it ought to, make the
gratification of revenge an object. This is the opinion, at any
rate, of two authorities so great, and so opposed in other views,
as Bishop Butler and Jeremy Bentham. /1/ Sir James Stephen says,
"The criminal law stands to the passion of revenge in much the
same relation as marriage to the sexual appetite." /2/

The first requirement of a sound body of law is, that it should
correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community,
whether right or wrong. If people would gratify the passion of
revenge outside of the law, if the law did not help them, the law
has no choice but to satisfy the craving itself, and thus avoid