204. According to the view here taken, then, there is no direct reference in punishment by the state, either retrospective or prospective, to moral good or evil. The state in its judicial action does not look to the moral guilt of the criminal whom it punishes, or to the promotion of moral good by means of his punishment in him or others. It looks not to virtue and vice but to rights and wrongs. It looks back to the wrong done in the crime which it punishes; not, however, in order to avenge it, but in order to the consideration of the sort of terror which needs to be associated with such wrong-doing in order to the future maintenance of rights. If the character of the criminal comes into account at all, it can only be properly as an incident of this consideration. Thus punishment of crime is preventive in its object; not, however, preventive of any or every evil and by any and every means, but (according to its idea or as it should be) _justly_ preventive of _injustice_; preventive of interference with those powers of action and acquisition which it is for the general well-being that individuals should possess, and according to laws which allow those powers equally to all men. But in order effectually to attain its preventive object and to attain it justly, it should be reformatory. When the reformatory office of punishment is insisted on, the reference may be, and from the judicial point of view must be, not to the moral good of the criminal as an ultimate end, but to his recovery from criminal habits as a means to that which is the proper and direct object of state-punishment, viz. the general protection of rights. The reformatory function of punishment is from this point of view an incident of its preventive function, as regulated by the consideration of what is just to the criminal as well as to others. For the fulfilment of this latter function, the great thing, as we have seen, is by the punishment of an actual criminal to deter other possible criminals; but for the same purpose, unless the actual criminal is to be put out of the way or locked up for life, it must be desirable to reform him so that he may not be dangerous in future. Now when it is asked why he should not be put out of the way, it must not be forgotten that among the rights which the state has to maintain are included rights of the criminal himself. These indeed are for the time suspended by his action in violation of rights, but founded as they are on the capacity for contributing to social good, they could only be held to be finally forfeited on the ground that this capacity was absolutely extinct.