200. The principle above stated, as that according to which punishment by the state should be inflicted and regulated, also justifies a distinction between crimes and civil injuries, i.e. between breaches of right for which the state inflicts punishment without redress to the person injured, and those for which it procures or seeks to procure redress to the person injured without punishment of the person causing the injury. We are not here concerned with the history of this distinction (for which see Maine, _Ancient Law_, chap. x, and W.E. Hearn, _The Aryan Household_, chap. xix), nor with the question whether many breaches of right now among us treated as civil injuries ought not to be treated as crimes, but with the justification that exists for treating certain kinds of breach of right as cases in which the state should interfere to procure redress for the person injured, but not in the way of inflicting punishment on the injurer until he wilfully resists the order to make redress. The principle of the distinction as ordinarily laid down, viz. that civil injuries 'are violations of rights when considered in reference to the injury sustained by the individual,' while crimes are 'violations of rights when considered in reference to their evil tendency as regards the community at large' (Stephen, Book V, chap, i), is misleading; for if the well-being of the community did not suffer in the hurt done to the individual, that hurt would not be a violation of a right in the true sense at all, nor would the community have any ground for insisting that the hurt shall be redressed, and for determining the mode in which it shall be redressed. A violation of right cannot in truth be considered merely in relation to injury sustained by an individual, for, thus considered, it would not be a violation of right. It may be said that the state is only concerned in procuring redress for civil injuries, because, if it left an individual to procure redress in his own way, there would be no public peace. But there are other and easier ways of preventing fighting than by procuring redress of wrong. We prevent our dogs from fighting, not by redressing wrongs which they sustain from each other (of wrongs as of rights they are in the proper sense incapable), but by beating them or tying them up. The community would not keep the peace by procuring redress for hurt or damage sustained by individuals, unless it conceived itself as having interest in the security of individuals from hurt and damage, unless it considered the hurt done to individuals as done to itself. The true justification for treating some breaches of right as cases merely for redress, others as cases for punishment, is that, in order to the general protection of rights, with some it is necessary to associate a certain terror, with others it is not.