ride carelessly at that corner,” or “to let that plan for a holiday interrupt me in my morning’s reading.” [1] P. 189. It may seem remarkable that reward plays a small and apparently decreasing part in the self-management of society by the public power. To the naïve Athenian, [1] it seemed a natural instrument for the encouragement of public spirit, probably rather by a want of discrimination between motives than by a real belief in political selfishness. In European countries honours still appear to play a considerable part, but on analysis it would be found less than it seems. Partly they are recognitions of important functions, and thus conditions rather than rewards. To a great extent, again, they recognise existing facts, and are rather consequences of the respect which society feels for certain types of life (with very curious results in regions where the general mind is inexperienced, _e.g._ in fine art) than means employed to regulate the conduct of citizens. We should think a soldier mean whose aim was a peerage, still more a poet or an artist. I hardly know that rewards adjudged by the State, as distinct from compensations, exist {219} in the United States of America. [2] Rewards then fill no place correlative to that of punishments, and the reason seems plain. Punishment corresponds much better to the negative method which alone is open to the State for the maintenance of rights. For Punishment proclaims its negative character, and no one can suppose it laudable simply to be deterred from wrong-doing by fear of punishment. But though precisely the same principle applies to meritorious actions done with a view to reward, an illusion is almost certain to arise which will hide the principle in this case. For, if reward is largely used as an inducement to actions conducive to the best life, it is almost certain that it will be used as an inducement to actions, the value and certainty of which depend on the state of will to which they are due. And then the distinction between getting them done, motive or no motive, which is the true region of State action, and their being done with a certain motive, which is necessary to give them either practical or moral value, is pretty sure to be obliterated, and the range of the moral will trenched upon in its higher portion and with a constant tendency to self-deception. [3] {220} It is the same truth in other words when we point out that taking reward and punishment, as interferences, only to deal with exceptional cases, reward would deal with the exceptionally good. Therefore, again, reward must either make an impossible attempt to deal with all the normal as good, which involves the danger of _de_-moralising the whole of normal life, or must take the line of specially promoting what is exceptionally conducive to good life; in which case confusion is certain to arise from interference with the delicate middle class of external actions analysed above.