horror that we do for brutal punishments; these never seem to them, as they do to us, only suitable to the most dangerous classes.
Many philosophers have protested against this mitigation of sentences; after what we have related earlier about Hartmann, we shall expect to meet him among those who protest. "We are already," he says, "approaching the time when theft and lying condemned by law will be despised as vulgar errors, as gross clumsiness, by the clever cheats who know how to preserve the letter of the law while infringing the rights of other people. For my part, I would much rather live amongst the ancient Germans, at the risk of being killed on occasion, than be obliged, as I am in modern cities, to look on every man as a swindler or a rogue unless I have evident proofs of his honesty."[1] Hartmann takes no account of economic conditions; he argues from an entirely personal point of view, and never looks at what goes on round him. Nobody to-day wants to run the risk of being slain by ancient Germans; fraud or a theft are very easily reparable.
C. Finally, in order to get to the heart of contemporary thought on this matter, it is necessary to examine the way in which the public judges the relations existing between the State and the criminal associations. Such relations have always existed; these associations, after having practised violence, have ended by employing craft alone, or at least their acts of violence have become somewhat exceptional.
Nowadays we should think it very strange if the magistrates were to put themselves at the head of armed bands, as they did in Rome during the last years of the Republic. In the course of the Zola trial, the Anti-Semites recruited bands of paid demonstrators, who were commissioned to manifest patriotic indignation; the Govern-
- ↑ Hartmann, loc. cit., p. 465.
