believing that legislators, while exhorting to virtue and putting
certain courses of conduct forward as right and honourable, in the
expectation that good men will obey the call, as their habits lead
them, should at the same time inflict chastisements and punishments
upon the crossgrained and disobedient; and as for the incurably
vicious, put them beyond the pale altogether. The result will be, that
the decent and conscientious citizen will listen to the voice of
reason, while the worthless votary of pleasure is chastened by pain
like a beast of burden.... Law has a coercive function, appealing to
force, notwithstanding that it is a reasoned conclusion of practical
wisdom and intelligence. The interference of persons is odious, when
it stands out against the tide of passion, even where it is right and
proper to interfere; but no odium attaches to statute law enjoining
the proper course." (Aristotle, _Ethics_, X., ix.)

3. Aristotle seems hard upon the masses, likening them to brutes who
must be governed by the whip. He may be supposed to speak from
experience of the men of his time. If humanity has somewhat improved
in two and twenty centuries, yet it cannot be contended that the whip
is grown unnecessary and beyond the whip the sword. But we must
observe a certain _modus operandi_ of punishment which Aristotle has
not noted, a more human mode than the terror of slavish fear. Just
punishment, felt as such, stimulates the conscience to discern and
abhor the crime. Men would think little of outraging their own nature
by excess, did they not know that the laws of God and man forbid such
outrage. Again, they would think little even of those laws, were not
the law borne out by the sanction of punishment. A law that may be
broken with impunity is taken to be the toying of a legislator not in
earnest. Men here are as children. A child is cautioned against lying.
He reckons little of the caution: he tells a lie, and a flogging