178. Is punishment retributive? Not in the sense that it carries on a supposed 'right' of private vengeance, for no such 'right' can exist
179. The most rudimentary 'right' of vengeance implies social recognition and regulation, in early times by the family
180. And its development up to the stage at which the state alone punishes is the development of a principle implied from the first
181. But if punishment excludes private vengeance, how can it be retributory at all? And how can a wrong to society be requited?
182. When a wrong is said to be 'done to society,' it does not mean that a feeling of vindictiveness is excited in the society
183. The popular indignation against a great criminal is an expression, not of individual desire for vengeance, but of the demand that the criminal should have his due
184. And this does not mean an equivalent amount of suffering; nor such suffering as has been found by experience to deter men from the crime
185. Punishment, to be just, implies (a) that the person punished can understand what right means, and (b) that it is some understood right that he has violated
186. He will then recognise that the punishment is his own act returning on himself; (it is in a different sense that the physical consequences of immorality are spoken of as a 'punishment')
187. Punishment may be said to be_ preventive_, if it be remembered (a) that what it 'prevents' must be the violation of a real right, and (b) that the means by which it 'prevents' must be really necessary