Now these two things are primarily to be noted in his case

Now these two things are primarily to be noted in his case. First, thatwe can only condemn him to a general doom, because we only knowhis general nature. All criminals, who do particular things for particularreasons(things and reasons which, however criminal, are always com-Prehensible), have been more and more tried for such separate actionsunder separate and suitable laws ever since Europe began to become acivilisation-and until the rare and recent re-incursions of barbarism insuch things as the Indeterminate Sentence.

Of that I shall speak later; it isenough for this argument to point out the plain facts. It is the plain factthat every savage, every sultan, every outlawed baron, every brigand-chief has always used this instrument of the Indeterminate Sentencewhich has been recently offered us as something highly scientifie andhumane. All these people, in short, being barbarians, have always kepttheir captives captive until they(the barbarians) chose to think the cap-tives were in a fit frame of mind to come out. It is also the plain fact thatall that has been called civilisation or progress, justice or liberty, fornearly three thousand years, has had the general direction of treatingeven the captive as a free man, in so far as some clear case of somedefined crime had to be shown against him. All law has meant allowingthe criminal, within some limits or other, to argue with the law: as jobwas allowed, or rather challenged, to argue with God. But the criminalis, among civilised men, tried by one law for one crime for a perfectlysimple reason: that the motive of the crime, like the meaning of the lawis conceivable to the common intelligence. A man is punished speciallyas a burglar, and not generally as a bad man, because a man may be aburglar and in many other respects not be a bad man. The act of burglaryis punishable because it is intelligible. But when acts are unintelligible,we can only refer them to a general untrustworthiness, and guardagainst them by a general restraint. If a man breaks into a house to get aPiece of bread, we can appeal to his reason in various ways. We can hangim for housebreaking: or again(as has occurred to some daringthinkers)we can give him a piece of bread. But if he breaks in, let us say,to steal the parings of other people's finger nails, then we are in a difficulty: we cannot imagine what he is going to do with them, and there-fore cannot easily imagine what we are going to do with him. If a villaincomes in, in cloak and mask, and puts a little arsenic in the soup, we cancollar him and say to him distinctly, You are guilty of Murder; and I willnow consult the code of tribal law, under which we live, to see if thispractice is not forbidden. But if a man in the same cloak and mask isfound at midnight putting a little soda-water in the soup, what can wesay? Our charge necessarily becomes a more general one. We can onlyobserve, with a moderation almost amounting to weakness, You seemto be the sort of person who will do this sort of thing. And then we canlock him up. The principle of the indeterminate sentence is the creationof the indeterminate mind. It does apply to the incomprehensiblecreature, the lunatic. And it applies to nobody else

The second thing to be noted is this: that it is only by the unanimity ofane men that we can condemn this man as utterly separate. If he says atree is a lamp-post he is mad; but only because all other men say it is atree. If some men thought it was a tree with a lamp on it, and othersthought it was a lamp-post wreathed with branches and vegetation, thenit would be a matter of opinion and degree; and he would not be madbut merely extreme. Certainly he would not be mad if nobody but a bot-anist could see it was a tree. Certainly his enemies might be madder thanhe, if nobody but a lamplighter could see it was not a lamp-post. Andsimilarly a man is not imbecile if only a Eugenist thinks so. The questionthen raised would not be his sanity, but the sanity of one botanist or onelamplighter or one Eugenist. That which can condemn the abnormallyfoolish is not the abnormally clever, which is obviously a matter in dispute. That which can condemn the abnormally foolish is the normallyfoolish. It is when he begins to say and do things that even stupid peopledo not say or do, that we have a right to treat him as the exception andnot the rule. It is only because we none of us profess to be anything morethan man that we have authority to treat him as something less

Now the first principle behind eubecomes plaingh. it isthe proposal that somebody orthing should criticise men with thesuperiority with which men criticise madmen. It might exercisethis right with great moderation; but I am not here talking about theercise but about the right. Its claim certainly is to bring all human lifeder the Lunacy lawsNow this is the first weakness in the case of the Eugehists: that thcannot define who is to control whom they cannot sav bw what author-ity they do these things. They cannot see the exception is different fromthe rule-cren when it is misrulewhen it is an unruly rule. TheruInain the old Lunacy Law was this that you cannot deny that ais a citizen until you are practically prepared to deny that he is anan Men, and only men, can be the judges of whether he is a man. Butany private club of prigs can be judges of whether he ought to be a cit-izen. When once we step down from that tal and splintered peak of pureinsanity w'e step on to a tableland where oneis not so widely differ-ent from another Outside the eyon, what we find is the average.And the practical, legal shape of the quarrel is this: that unless the nor-mal men have the right to expel the abnormal, what particular sort of ab-normal men have the right to expel the normal men? If sanity is not goodenough, what is there that is saner than sanity?Without any grip of the notion of a rule and an exception, the generalidea of judging peoples heredity breaks down and is useless. For thisson: that if ererything is the result of a doubtful heredity, the judg-ment itself is the result of a doubtful heredity also. Let it judge not that itbe not judged. Eugenists, strange to say, have fathers and mothers likeexactly as much as their opinions aboutNone of the parents wlunatics, and the rest is mere likes and dislikes. Suppose Dr. Saleebv hadgone up to Byron and said, My lord, I perceive you hate a club-foot andinordinate passions: such are the hereditary results of a profligate soldierThe poet might logically reply(withcharacteristic lucidity and impropriety), Sir, I perceive you havefused mind and an unphilosophic theory about other people s love af-fairs. Such are the hereditary delusions bred by a Syrian doctor marryinga Quaker lady from York. Suppose Dr Karlhad said to shelleyfrom whayour temperament, you are running great risks inming a connection with the daughtfanatic and eccentric likGodwin. Shelley would be employing the strict rationalism of the oldeand stronger free thinkers, if he answered, "From what I observe of vourmind, you are rushing on destruction in marrying the great-niece of anoldcorpse of a courtier and dilettante like Samuel Rogers. It is only opin-ion for opinion. Nobody can pretend that cither Mary Godwin or SamuelRogers was mad: and the geheral view a man may hold about the healthiness of inheriting their blood or type is simply the same sort of generalview by which men do marry for love or liking. There is no reason tosuppose that Dr. Karl Pearson is any better judge of a bridegroom thanthe bridegroom is of a bride