CHAELES MEECIER, Criminal Responsibility. 409 motive of the law, why do we not punish severely the classes of offence which probably cause more acute suffering than any other, namely seduction followed by desertion and those offences which lead to the divorce court ? The author would have us accept our instinctive desire to avenge injury as the ultimate court of appeal (p. 17). The proof that an act should be punished is that it " raises in you and me, and Tom, and Dick, and Harry, the desire that Bill should suffer pain ". " When I declare that A is responsible for the murder of B ... I mean . . . that in my own mind there is a feeling of uneasiness which demands relief, and cannot be relieved except by the infliction of pain upon A." How then, when A by iccident steps painfully on my toe ? Am I right in relieving my leasiness, in giving vent to my instinctive anger by striking him riolently ? The truth is, of course, that the task of practical ethics to refine conduct by the deliberate self-conscious control of such istinctive emotional reactions and desires ; and to set them up as ultimate court of appeal is to reject the results of social evolu- tion and to go back to the level of the brutes. For even in savage immunities punishment is commonly based on higher grounds lan the merely retributive, and aims largely at determent from )cially inexpedient conduct ; as when an unmarried girl, becoming Dregnant, is punished by being isolated until the child is born, cording to the author's doctrine no punishable offender should an object of pity, for pity and desire for retribution are incom- itible states of feeling in regard to any one person. Yet the lodern tendency of society is to pity the criminal at the same time that it demands strict punishment. Perhaps the case for itribution breaks down most completely in the case of the punish- lent of the child by the loving parent whose heart is wrung with pity and sympathetic suffering while he punishes ; and curiously jnough the author fully admits on a later page (p. 63) the wrong- ilness of retributive punishment in this particular case. In spite of this unsatisfactory opening the rest of the book con- stitutes an important contribution to the subject, especially to the problem of the responsibility of persons of abnormal or diseased constitution. The second chapter arrives at a satisfactory definition of voluntary action, by way of an acute discussion and emendation of the definition given by Sir James Stephen. It runs, " a voluntary act is movement, or arrest or suppression of movement, of the body, directed to an aim or end, and accompanied or preceded by the will to make that movement, or arrest or suppression of move- ment ". The author might with advantage have gone on to distin- guish between the voluntary act so defined and the deed, that change in the external world which is effected by the act. For the two things are by no means identical. Many actions fail to accom- plish the deed intended. If I put out my hand to help a friend over a stile and, slipping, bring us both heavily to the ground the act is good because the motive and intention of it were good. But the deed is bad. Or again, a father thrashes his son for
