with the violation of them, when the special temptation to their violation itself implies a violation of right in the persons of those who are so tempted, as is the case when a general danger to property arises from the fact that many people are on the edge of starvation. The attempt to do so is at once ineffectual and diverts attention from the true way of protecting the endangered right, which is to prevent people from falling into a state of starvation. In any tolerably organised society the condition of a man, ordinarily honest and industrious, who is driven to theft by hunger, will be so abnormal that very little terror needs to be associated with the crime as so committed in order to maintain the sanctity of property in the general imagination. Suppose again a man to be killed in a quarrel arising out of his having tampered with the fidelity of his neighbour's wife. In such a case 'extenuating circumstances' may fairly be pleaded against the infliction of the extremest penalty, because the extremest terror does not need to be associated with homicide, as committed under such conditions, in order to the general protection of human life, and because the attempt so to associate it would tend, so far as successful, to weaken the general sense of the wrong--the breach of family right--involved in the act which, in the case supposed, provokes the homicide. 195. 'After all,' it may be said, 'this is a far-fetched way of explaining the admission of extenuating circumstances as modifying the punishment of crime. Why so strenuously avoid the simpler explanation, that extenuating circumstances are taken into account because they are held to modify the moral guilt of the crime? Is not their recognition a practical proof that the punishment of a crime by the state represents the moral disapproval of the community? Does it not show that, however imperfectly the amount of punishment inflicted on a crime may in fact correspond to its moral wickedness, it is generally felt that it ought to do so?'