But behind _you_, I see a worse fellow; a gloomy fanatic;
a religious sycophant that seeks to propitiate his circle by bitterness
against the offences that are most unlike his own. And against him, I
must say one word for Kate to the too hasty reader. This villain, whom
I mark for a shot if he does not get out of the way, opens his fire on
our Kate under shelter of a lie. For there is a standing lie in the
very constitution of civil society, a _necessity_ of error,
misleading us as to the proportions of crime. Mere necessity obliges
man to create many acts into felonies, and to punish them as the
heaviest offences, which his better sense teaches him secretly to
regard as perhaps among the lightest. Those poor deserters, for
instance, were they necessarily without excuse? They might have been
oppressively used; but in critical times of war, no matter for the
individual palliations, the deserter from his colors _must_ be
shot: there is no help for it: as in extremities of general famine, we
shoot the man (alas! we are _obliged_ to shoot him) that is found
robbing the common stores in order to feed his own perishing children,
though the offence is hardly visible in the sight of God. Only
blockheads adjust their scale of guilt to the scale of human
punishments.
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