Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/135

No. 1.] private property existed all free members of the tribes were equal and armed. When a part of the tribe had settled on the common land long enough to lay aside their weapons, the other part subjugated them, seized the land, and enslaved the workers. That subjugation of the many to the few, as in slavery and property, must end some day and the fruits reaped be distributed. Then the instrument of education, productive property, would disappear.

Criticism of a social institution on moral grounds is a sign of its approaching change or dissolution. In reference to property, when there is enough power to establish new institutions, the real right will be born. The struggle for the possession of the fruits secured to society by competition has begun, and new institutions must arise to express the interests of the victors. They will not be the party of Henry George and the German land-nationalizers, for it shows no trace of a new conception of society and does not see that all property in the means of production has the same tendency and results.

The writer discusses the retributive and the utilitarian theories of punishment, the former making it an end in itself, and the latter making it a means of prevention or reformation. The retributive theory is perhaps a survival of the primitive notion that blood demands blood. Resentment at the sight of wrong-doing and desire that the doer be punished are attributable to the fact that punishment leads to amendment. Consider it apart from its effects, and there is no moral justification for the infliction of pain. If punishment were an end, its amount should be determined by the crime. But moral guilt and physical pain are incommensurable; the amount of pain appropriate for any crime is incapable of estimate.

An intermediate view, viz. that punishment exists as an end and yet that its amount and nature may be determined by utilitarian considerations, reduces the retributive theory to very modest limits. Such a position, however, includes three elements of truth neglected by thorough-going utilitarians. 1. It is true to the historical origin of state punishment in private vengeance, and accounts for many existing distinctions in the law; such as that between attempted and executed crime. 2. It admits that punishment is reformatory, while many advocates of punishing to reform at bottom disbelieve that punishment, i.e. pain, exerts a reforming influence. Pain, bodily or mental, and even the dread of it, keep the lower self under, and thus punishment on its reformatory side is an artificial creation of conditions favorable to moral improvement.