one essential part, the administration of criminal law in such a way as to be in conformity with the conditions of healthy social development. The difficulty, I think, though I can only indicate the argument briefly, results from a common illusion, which is illustrated by the once famous social contract theory. You suppose a number of independent individuals, agreeing to join and expecting to receive a precise equivalent for every sacrifice that they make in consequence. The reply is, that the individual is the product of the society, and it is a mere fiction to consider him as possessing any antecedent rights whatever. His rights are to be deduced from, not to supply the premisses for deducing, the social order. The only considerations which are relevant are those which affect the welfare of the social organism, taken as a whole; and we must regard them as determined, before we come to the distribution of benefits and burdens among its constituent facts. Otherwise, we should be falling into the same fallacy as if we argued about the health of separate bodily organs, legs, and arms, and stomachs, as though they were independent things, fastened together to make a single machine. Since the leg implies the stomach, any consideration of the leg's separate rights would be absurd. So the individual member of a political society cannot be regarded as though he had existed outside society somewhere, and was entitled to a precise equivalent for the sacrifice of his independence. The doctrine involves impossible considerations. I have to contribute to certain sanitary regulations, though I may be stronger or weaker than my neighbours, and therefore less or more in need of them. Or, I have to pay a school-rate, whether I have a dozen children or none at all. Do those facts give me a right to complain if I am taxed equally with my neighbours? If so, every benefit which I receive from society must be set down as a separate item in an account to be balanced by itself. Obviously, the advantage which I receive in such cases is the whole advantage received from living in a healthy place or among educated people; and it is essentially impossible to cut that up into a number of different bits of happiness conferred in return for separate payments on account. If I use the contract formula, I must interpret it to mean that amenability to various regulations, including the criminal law, is part of the whole bargain, which would have been made, if it had ever been real, when I decided, if I ever had decided, to join the society. The instinct for punishing criminals guilty of violence is one of the fundamental instincts of civilisation, and we must accept it just as we accept any other fundamental instinct.