203. The actual distinction between crimes and civil injuries in English law is no doubt largely accidental. As the historians of law point out, the civil process, having compensation, not punishment, for its object, is the form which the interference of the community for the maintenance of rights originally takes. The community, restraining private vengeance, helps the injured person to redress, and regulates the way in which redress shall be obtained. This procedure no doubt implies the conviction that the community is concerned in the injury done to an individual, but it is only by degrees that this conviction becomes explicit, and that the community comes to treat all preventible breaches of right as offences against itself or its sovereign representative, i.e. as crimes or penal; in the language of English law, as 'breaches of the king's peace.' Those offences are first so treated which happen to excite most public alarm, most fear for general safety (hence, among others, anything thought sacrilegious). In a country like England, where no code has been drawn up on general principles, the class of injuries that are treated penally is gradually enlarged as public alarm happens to be excited in particular directions, but it is largely a matter of accident how the classification of crimes on one side and civil injuries on the other happens to stand at any particular time. [1] [1] See Markby, _Elements of Law_, chap. xi, especially note 1, p. 243; and Austin, Lecture XXVII. Between crimes and civil injuries the distinction, as it actually exists, is merely one of procedure (as stated by Austin, p. 518). The violation of right in one case is proceeded against by the method of indictment, in the other by an 'action.' The distinction that in one case punishment is the object of the process, in the other redress, is introduced in order to explain the difference of procedure; and to justify this distinction resort is had to the further distinction, that civil injury is considered to affect the individual merely, crime to affect the state. But in fact the action for civil injury may incidentally have a penal result (Austin, p 521), and if it had not, many violations of right now treated as civil injuries would have to be treated as crimes. As an explanation therefore of the distinction between crimes and injuries as it stands, it is not correct to say that for the former punishment is sought, for the latter merely redress. Nor for reasons already given is it true of any civil injury to say that it affects, or should be considered as affecting, injured individuals _merely_. The only distinction of principle is that between violations of right which call for punishment and those which do not; and those only do not call for punishment in some form or other which arise either from uncertainty as to the right violated, or from inability to prevent the violation.