"Hear! Hear!" cried Tutt admiringly.
"Fundamentally there is only an arbitrary distinction between wrongs, sins and crimes. The meanest and most detestable of men, beside whom an honest burglar is a sympathetic human being, may yet never violate a criminal statute."
"That's so!" said Tutt. "Take Badger, for instance."
"How often we defend cases," ruminated his partner, "where the complainant is just as bad as the prisoner at the bar—if not worse."
"And of course," added Tutt, "you must admit there are a lot of criminals who are criminals from perfectly good motives. Take the man, for instance, who thrashes a bystander who insults his wife—the man's wife, I mean, naturally."
"Only in those cases where we elect to take the law into our own hands we ought to be willing to accept the consequences like gentlemen and sportsmen," commented the senior partner.
"This is all very interesting, no doubt," remarked Miss Wiggin, "but as a matter of general information I should like to know why the criminal law doesn't punish the sinners—as well as the criminals."
"I guess one reason," replied Tutt, "is that people don't wish to be kept from sinning."
"Thou hast spoken!" agreed Mr. Tutt. "And another reason is that the criminal law was not originally devised for the purpose of eradicating sin—which, after all, is the state into which it is said man was born—but was only intended to prevent certain kinds of physical violence and lawlessness—murder, highway robbery, assault, and so on. The church was supposed to take care of sin, and there was an elaborate system of ecclesiastical courts. In point of fact, though there is a great deal of misconception on the subject, the criminal law does not deal with sin as sin at all, or even with wrongs merely as wrongs. It has a precise and limited purpose—namely, to prevent certain kinds of acts and to compel the performance of other acts.
"The state relies on the good taste and sense of decency, duty and justice of the individual citizen to keep him in order most of the time. It doesn't, or anyhow it shouldn't, attempt to deal with trifling peccadillos; it generally couldn't. It merely says that if a man's conscience and idea of fair play aren't enough to make him behave himself, why, then, when he gets too obstreperous we'll lock him up. And different generations have had entirely different ideas about what was too obstreperous to be overlooked. In the early days the law only punished bloodshed and violence. Later on, its scope was increased, until thousands of acts and omissions are now made criminal by statute. But that explains why the fact that something is a sin doesn't necessarily mean that it is a crime. The law is artificial and not founded on any general attempt to prohibit what is unethical, but simply to prevent what is immediately dangerous to life, limb and property."