So much and such complex argumentation may not impossibly be deemed a good deal in excess of what is requisite to establish the conclusion to which it points, and which may be summed up in the following very simple propositions:--That, by a person's rights being understood the privilege of having or doing whatever no other person has a right to prevent his having or doing, justice consists of abstinence from conduct that would interfere with that privilege; that justice, therefore, is not dependent on extrinsic sanction, but arises spontaneously from the nature of things, and may almost indeed be said to spring necessarily from the meaning of words; and that its sole merit is exemption from the demerit that would attach to the withholding or withdrawing from any person anything belonging or due to that person. With all possible confidence, however, in the innate vigour of these propositions, I cannot suppose that they do not require all possible adventitious strengthening to be qualified to displace the doctrine to which they are opposed. I proceed, therefore, to test somewhat further the adequacy of the description of justice which they involve by confronting it with certain intricate problems, in presence of which the rival utilitarian definition will be found to be hopelessly at fault. There are few subjects on which casuists have differed more widely than those of the legitimacy, and the proper measure of punishment. One thinks it unjust that anybody should be punished for the sake of example to others, or for any purpose except his own amelioration. A second replies that it is only for the sake of other people's good that an offender ought to be punished; for that, as for his own good, he himself should be left to decide what that is, and he is pretty sure not to decide that it is punishment. A third pronounces all punishment unjust, seeing that a man does not make himself criminal, but is made so by circumstances beyond his control--by his birth, parentage, education, and the temptations he meets with. Then, for the apportionment of punishment, some persons think there is no principle like that of the _lex talionis_--an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Others that the penalty should be accurately proportioned to the immorality of the offence, by whatever standard that immorality be measured. Others, again, that punishment should be limited to the minimum necessary to deter from crime, quite irrespectively of the heinousness of the particular crime punished. Of the first three of these opinions, Mr. Mill observes that 'they are all extremely plausible, and that so long as the question is argued as one of justice simply, without going down to the principles that lie under justice, and are the source of its authority, he is unable to see how any one of the reasoners can be refuted. For every one of them builds upon rules of justice confessedly true--each is triumphant so long as he is not obliged to take into