much, that the world we are in is certainly not that of the vulgar mind.
We must be careful here not to suffer ourselves to be led astray. The empirical origin in history, or in the individual, of the notions of justice and desert is for us altogether beside the point. For we are concerned with the ‘What,’ and not here at all with the question, ‘How comes it to be?’ And though often (I do not say, always) for a complete result we must consider both; yet to run them into one, and confuse them together, is an error as common as it is utterly ruinous. We have to answer no more than the question ‘what’, and that in the sense of, what is the vulgar notion? And secondly, we must not wander to a discussion on the right to punish. We need not ask how it is, that, if 99 men are of opinion, that it is more convenient, for both the 99 and the 100th, or for the 100th without the 99, or the 99 without the 100th, that he, the 100th, should cease to exist—that therefore it is right for their opinion to be conveyed to him by the hanging of him, whatever may be his opinion on the subject. The discussion of this question we leave to utilitarian philosophers. We must keep to facts, and fortunately they are plain. For our vulgar, once more, punishment is the complement of criminal desert; is justifiable only so far as deserved; and further is an end in itself. For our Necessitarian, punishment is avowedly never an end in itself; it is never justifiable, except as a means to an external end.
‘There are two ends,’ says the late Mr Mill (Hamilton, p. 592), and he means there are only two ends, ‘which, on the Necessitarian
