“A good thing, too,” said my good master. “But I should prefer that judges confess that they punish the guilty from pure necessity, and only to make impressive examples. In that case they would merely hold by what was actually necessary. But if they think, in punishing, to give the guilty his due, one sees to what this delicate discrimination will lead them, and their probity itself will make them inexorable; for one knows not how to refuse people what is due to them. This maxim horrifies me, Monsieur. It was laid down with the greatest severity by an able philosopher of the name of Menardus, who pretends that to fail to punish an ill-doer is to do him wrong, and wickedly to deprive him of the right to expiate his fault. He held that the Athenian magistrates had done excellently well by Socrates the sage, and that they worked for the purification of his soul when they made him drink the hemlock. But those are odious thoughts. I ask that criminal justice should tend less to the sublime. The notion of pure revenge attached more commonly to the punishment of malefactors, although base and bad in itself, is less terrible in its consequences than the overweening virtue of ingenuous philosophers. I knew in former days, in Séez, a jovial and good sort of fellow, who took his children on his knee every evening and told them tales. He led an exemplary life, went to the sacraments, and prided himself on his scrupulous honesty in the corn business he had carried on for more than sixty years. Now he happened to be robbed by his servant of some doubloons, ducats, rose-nobles, and some fine gold coins, which he, curious of such things, kept in a case at the back of a drawer. As soon as he discovered this loss he carried complaint to the police, whereupon the maidservant was questioned, tried, condemned, and executed. The good man, who knew his rights, exacted that the skin of the thief should be given to him, of which he made a pair of pantaloons; and he would often smack his thigh and cry, ‘The hussy! the hussy!’ The girl had taken his gold pieces, he had taken her skin; anyway he had his unphilosophical revenge in all the simplicity of his rustic savagery. He had no notion of fulfilling a lofty duty when he slapped his hand light-heartedly on his garment of human skin. Better is it to acknowledge that if one hangs a thief it is for prudence’ sake, and with the object of frightening the others by his example, and not at all on the philosophical plea for the sake of giving each man his due. For in true philosophy nothing belongs to anyone if we except life itself. To pretend that we owe expiation to criminals is to fall into mysticism of a ferocious description, worse than naked violence and open anger. As to the punishment of thieves, it is a right which has its origin in force, not in philosophy. Philosophy teaches us, on the contrary, that all we possess is acquired by violence or by cunning. And you see also that judges approve of our