Social history made it clear that capital punishment had dwindled in frequency from a common public entertainment to something almost rare. The states still practicing it gave evidence of official shame, or at least of a schizophrenic need to serve two contraries, to appease the recurrent vengefulness of their multitudes but also to hide the dirty thing, tacitly apologize, soften its most visible nastiness in the hope that conscience would shut up and sleep again. Such a condition would be preliminary to change. Like tuberculosis and venereal disease, capital punishment was on the way out but going out in the manner of things legal, with dreary and creeping slowness. Wasn't that how he had reasoned two years ago, when his name was up in the election more or less unopposed? Or had he honestly faced it at all? Hadn't he simply regarded a judgeship as mostly useful work and $18,000 a year? And hadn't he accepted, without enough examination, the doctrine that a judge is only an instrument of something greater than himself? An instrument of _what_ something, greater than himself _in what way_? The questions projected themselves beyond the cloud-curtain of mysticism. But it seemed to Judge Mann that unless they could receive a daylight answer, the doctrine itself was solemn nonsense. Imagining Society with a capital S to be greater than the individual--no answer there, only a more opaque mysticism. The mental construction "Society" is an achievement of the individual brain, an organ that had better not be too dazzled by products of its own authorship. The issue of capital punishment had been bound to arise. _I knew the laws. I knew that New Essex was no more free than any other state from crime and the balancing crime of punishment._ From an unseeing stare at the carpet, his head jerked up as if at the entrance of another. _Balancing crime of punishment_: he had been thinking in specific words, talking to a half-personalized projection of the self, and the words had power to startle him.