180. From this state of things it is a long step to the régime of law in a duly constituted state. Under it the arm of the state alone is the organ through which force may be exercised on the individual; the individual is prohibited from averting violence by violence, except so far as is necessary for the immediate protection of life, and altogether from avenging wrong done to him, on the understanding that the society, of which he is an organ and from which he derives his rights, being injured in every injury to him, duly protects him against injury, and when it fails to prevent such injury from being done, inflicts such punishment on the offender as is necessary for future protection. But the process from the one state of things to the other, though a long one, consists in the further development of that social right [1] which properly speaking was the only right the individual ever had, and from the first, or ever since a permanent family tie existed, was present as a qualifying and restraining element in the exercise of private vengeance so far as that exercise partook at all in the nature of a right. The process is not a continuance of private vengeance under altered forms, but a gradual suppression of it by the fuller realisation of the higher principle which all along controlled it. [1] 'Social right,' i.e. right belonging to a society of persons recognising a common good, and belonging through membership of the society to the several persons constituting it. The society to which the right belongs, is in principle or possibility a society of all men as rendered capable of free intercourse with each other by the organisation of the state. Actually at first it is only this or that family; then some association of families; finally the state, as including all other forms of association, reconciling the rights which arise out of them, and thus the most perfect medium through which the individual can contribute to the good of mankind and mankind to his. 181. But it will be asked, how upon this view of the nature of punishment as inflicted by the state it can be considered retributory. If no private vengeance, no vengeance of the injured individual, is involved in punishment, there can be no vengeance in it at all. The conception of vengeance is quite inappropriate to the action of society or the state on the criminal. The state cannot be supposed capable of vindictive passion. Nor, if the essence of crime is a wrong done to society, does it admit of retaliation upon the person committing it. A hurt done to an individual can be requited by the infliction of a like hurt upon the person who has done it; but no equivalent of wrong done to society can be paid back to the doer of it.