SANE CONCLUSIONS

And now I must ask the excited reader not to lose his head on one
side or the other, but to draw a sane moral from these grim
absurdities. It is not good sense to propose that laws against
crime should apply to principals only and not to accessories
whose consent, counsel, or silence may secure impunity to the
principal. If you institute punishment as part of the law, you
must punish people for refusing to punish. If you have a police,
part of its duty must be to compel everybody to assist the
police. No doubt if your laws are unjust, and your policemen
agents of oppression, the result will be an unbearable violation
of the private consciences of citizens. But that cannot be
helped: the remedy is, not to license everybody to thwart the law
if they please, but to make laws that will command the public
assent, and not to deal cruelly and stupidly with lawbreakers.
Everybody disapproves of burglars; but the modern burglar, when
caught and overpowered by a householder usually appeals, and
often, let us hope, with success, to his captor not to deliver
him over to the useless horrors of penal servitude. In other
cases the lawbreaker escapes because those who could give him up
do not consider his breech of the law a guilty action. Sometimes,
even, private tribunals are formed in opposition to the official
tribunals; and these private tribunals employ assassins as
executioners, as was done, for example, by Mahomet before he had
established his power officially, and by the Ribbon lodges
of Ireland in their long struggle with the landlords. Under such
circumstances, the assassin goes free although everybody in the
district knows who he is and what he has done. They do not betray
him, partly because they justify him exactly as the regular