Carrying out the principle underlying the relationship of debtor and creditor we arrive at the formation of the community. In return for protection and for communal advantages the individual pledged his good behaviour. When he violated this contract with the community, the community, in the guise of the defrauded creditor, took its revenge, or exacted its payment, from the debtor, the criminal. And, as was the case in early history, the community deprived the violator of future advantages and protection. The debtor was divested of all rights, even of mercy, for then there were no degrees in law-breaking. Primitive law was martial law. Says Nietzsche, "This shows why war itself (counting the sacrificial cult of war) has produced all the forms under which punishment has manifested itself in history." Later, as the community gathered strength, the offences of the individual debtors were looked upon as less serious. Out of its security grew leniency toward the offender: the penal code became mitigated, and, as in all powerful nations to-day, the criminal was protected. Only when there was a consciousness of weakness in a community did the acts of individual offenders take on an exaggerated seriousness, and under such conditions the law was consequently harshest. Thus, justice and the infliction of legal penalties are direct outgrowths of the primitive relation of debt between individuals. Herein we have the origin of guilt. Nietzsche attempts an elaborate analysis of the history of punishment, in an effort to ascertain its true meaning, its relation to guilt and to the community, and its final effects on both the individual and society. It has been impossible to present the sequence of this analysis by direct excerpts from his own words, due to the close, synthetic manner in which he has made his research. Therefore I offer the following brief exposition of pages 88 to 99 inclusive, in which he examines the causes and effects of punishment. To begin with, Nietzsche disassociates the "origin" and the "end" of punishment, and regards them as two separate and distinct problems. He argues that the final utility of a thing, in the sense that revenge and deterrence are the final utilities of punishment, is in all cases opposed to the origin of that thing; that every force or principle is constantly being put to new purposes by forces greater than itself, thus making it impossible to determine its inception by the end for which it is used. Therefore the "function" of punishing was not conceived with a view to punishing, but may have been employed for any number of ends, according as a will to power has overcome that function and made use of it for its own purpose: in short; punishment, like any organ or custom or "thing," has passed through a series of new interpretations and adjustments and meanings--and is _not_ a direct and logical _progress as_ to an end.