Wrongdoing

“ In all such instances the question at issue is to know whether the supposed offender is a wrongdoer and a worthless person, or not; for vice and wrongdoing consist in the moral purpose, and such terms as outrage and theft further indicate purpose; for if a man has struck, it does not in all cases follow that he has committed an outrage, but only if he has struck with a certain object, for instance, to bring disrepute upon the other or to please himself. ”

“ We estimate wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience; ”

“ It may remain a quiescent spectator of evil, or, if strong enough and indignant with the wrongdoing, may endeavour to abate the mischief by remonstrance, and, in the last resort, by taking sides against the offender. ”

“ His continual threats of a judgment that was still delayed, brought upon him the merciless ridicule of his opponents.
Or the prophet may mean to complain that the monotony of his message, his ever-recurring denunciation of prevalent injustice, is made a reproach against him. For as often as I speak I make an outcry of indignation at foul wrongdoing (Gen. iv. 10, xviii. 21, xix. 13) ; wrong and robbery do I proclaim (Hab. i. 2, 3) —the oppression of the poor by the covetous and luxurious ruling classes. ”

“ One chief outlet for the malevolent impulses is the avenging of wrong, whether private or public. A convicted wrong-doer is punished by the law, and the indignation roused by the crime turns to gratification at the punishment. ”

“ I cannot say that I believe in doing evil that good may come. I do not. I think that any man who honestly justifies such course deceives himself. But this I can say: to call any act evil, instantly begs the question. Many an act that man does is right or wrong according to the time and place which form, so to speak, its context; strip it of its surrounding circumstances, and you tear away its meaning. Gentlemen reformers, beware of this common practice of yours! beware of calling an act evil on Tuesday because that same act was evil on Monday! ”

“ But what renders your injustice toward the pious still more cruel, is, that it is your own examples, your irregularities, and even your censures, which stagger, weaken, and force them sometimes to imitate you; it is the corruption of your manners which becomes the continual and the most dangerous snare to their innocence; it is those foolish derisions with which you continually assault virtue, that force them reluctantly to shelter themselves under the appearances of guilt. ”

“ As we are apt to be mistaken in our judgment with regard to the general character of persons, so are we equally so with regard to their evil intentions. An offence is taken from something that has been said or done to us. Now what has been said or done, may not have been the result of either ill-will or malice. It may have been the result of a wrong judgment they had hastily formed, or from some excited state of mind they may have been led to say, or act as they did. ”

“ "That is the bitterest of all—to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing. ”

“ Be but as assiduous against evil as others have been for it, and you have a fair chance to prevent it for ages. Why should not honour, virtue, and good conscience, be as active and zealous as falsehood, corruption, and guilty minds? ”

“ He who makes presents to a lady, or a minister of justice, attempts their corruption by the act, and in his imagination supposes he has effected it. You ought, therefore, [Pg 9] my Son, to consider every one who attempts to gain your favour by such means, as an enemy to your conscience, and as a person dangerous to, and one who would injure your honour; and you should look upon him as a man, more deserving of your contempt and indignation, than your courtesy. ”

“ Then they will ask of us, Why, if there are no evils, do you refrain from certain deeds and actions? Why do you not do all that eager lust has required or demanded? Why, finally, do you establish punishments by terrible laws for the guilty? For what more monstrous [5] act of folly can be found than to assert that there are no evils, and at the same time to kill and condemn the erring as though they were evil? ”

“ For when it becomes necessary to choose between these three predicaments, either to do wrong without retribution, or to do wrong with retribution, or to do no wrong at all, it is best to do wrong with impunity; next, neither to do wrong nor to suffer for it; but nothing is more wretched than to struggle incessantly between the wrong we inflict and that we receive. ”

“ Whence it comes to pass, that in their results we have sometimes found the same spirit of cruelty and revenge, of malice and pride, the same blindness and obstinacy and unsteadiness, the same ungovernable rage and anger, the same injustice, sophistry, and fraud, that ever lodged in the breast of any individual. ”

“ We have never gone out of our way to look for trouble, being more inclined to attend to our own affairs than to oversee those of our neighbors, and, yet, when, repeatedly, gross acts of injustice and cruelty have been forced under our observation, we have, at times, been aroused to a state of what we have honestly believed to be righteous indignation, and, in these circumstances, we have conducted ourselves in accordance with our ability and the fervor of our convictions. ”

“ The results of wrong-doing, not only in the form of legal punishment imposed but in the remorse and the pangs of guilty conscience that the wrong-doer suffers, as well as in the disgrace that he brings to others through his criminal acts, when emphasized in news stories tend to deter others from risking the dangers of such penalties. ”

“ He walks by the rules of righteousness and truth, and scorns and abhors the gains of injustice and fraud. He reckons that that cannot be a good bargain, nor a saving one, which is made with a lie, and that he who wrongs his neighbour, though ever so plausibly, will prove, in the end, to have done the greatest injury to himself. ”

“ Nor do I know anything which can raise an honest man's indignation higher than that the same morals should be in one place attended with all imaginable misery and infamy, and in the other, with the highest luxury and honour. Let any impartial man in his senses be asked, for which of these two places a composition of cruelty, lust, avarice, rapine, insolence, hypocrisy, fraud and treachery, was best fitted, surely his answer must be certain and immediate ”

“ For some, when they see the injustice which they themselves suffer at the hands of evil-doers, are inflamed with detestation of the offenders, and, in the endeavour to be unlike those whom they hate, return to the ways of virtue. ”

“ How long will it take an individual or a nation to conquer prejudices, by continuing to practice and excuse them;—substituting general acknowledgements of their guilt, for immediately and thoroughly repudiating them? ”

“ How gladly would I pass unnoticed the evil I have sustained; but I owe it to society to detect an offender, and prevent other men from being imposed upon, as I have been, by an appearance of integrity. ”

“ It is to say that we must resign our conduct and our consciences to the will of others, and act wickedly, or well, as their good or evil may preponderate, without merit for virtue or responsibility for crime. ”

“ To say nothing of those evils one man brings upon another, as poverty, imprisonment, infamy, dishonesty, racks, snares, treachery, reproaches, actions, deceits--but I'm got into as endless a work as numbering the sands--for what offenses mankind have deserved these things, or what angry god compelled them to be born into such miseries is not my present business. ”

“ Nevertheless, I have generally noticed, when I have read much about murders or other great crimes, or about the social or political misdeeds which are not called crimes, that every piece of additional knowledge about the manner in which the thing was done, the inducements that led to it, the conduct that followed it, has, for me at least, set the capital act of wrong in a more hideous light. ”

“ He must have established deceivers to mislead them with lies, to terrify them with the wrath of God, in case they stir hand or foot, or so much as a thought, to mend their doleful condition; as if the good God was the sanctifier of all villainy, the patron of the worst of all villains! ”

“ He that has much to do will do something wrong, and of that wrong must suffer the consequences; and, if it were possible that he should always act rightly, yet when such numbers are to judge of his conduct, the bad will censure and obstruct him by malevolence, and the good sometimes by mistake. ”

“ That is the bitterest of all—to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing. But if you submitted to that as men submit to maiming or life-long incurable disease?—and made the unalterable wrong a reason for more effort toward a good, that may do something to counterbalance the evil? One who has committed irremediable errors may be scourged by that consciousness into a higher course than is common. ”

“ A celebrated writer has added a little book, to be used while looking at the picture, and drawn inferences of universal interest.
Such would we draw; such as this! Let no one dare to call another mad who is not himself willing to rank in the same class for every perversion and fault of judgment. Let no one dare aid in punishing another as criminal who is not willing to suffer the penalty due to his own offences. ”

“ For the practical purposes of modern law we may divide torts into three groups, wrongs of a personal character, wrongs affecting property, and wrongs affecting person and property, either or both. Under the first group come the wrongs of physical violence and restraint, namely, assault and false imprisonment; then the wrong done to men's good name by libel and slander, in which kind there are sundry curious and not wholly rational distinctions ”

“ On the contrary, when we gaze upon the progress of the vicious and the criminal, however successful and prosperous in their brief space of action, to contempt and indignation, to disgust and horror, are added the same consciousness of a hereafter, and the certainty of an awful retribution. ”

“ The vice does not lie in assenting to the proofs they see, but in being blind to many of the proofs that offer. So that, though our erroneous opinions be involuntary when formed, yet, as we have been wilfully corrupt or very negligent in forming them, we deserve punishment for our vice, or contempt for our folly. ”

“ The irony of wrong-doing lies much in the deception it practices on the wrong-doer, blunting his sense of danger while it blunts his conscience, leading him blindly to choose out for himself a way to destruction. The little widower was jubilant over the summons to the courthouse. ”

“ However great may be the mass of folly, ignorance, and fanaticism, which prevail throughout most of the low conventicles of this metropolis, and however injuriously they may operate on the human mind, their effects are innocence and virtue, compared to the influence of that guilt which I have exposed, and which I am prepared to expose still more effectually in any Court of Justice. ”

“ With respect to what is said of the necessity of protecting society from the bad example set to others by the vicious or the self-indulgent; it is true that bad example may have a pernicious effect, especially the example of doing wrong to others with impunity to the wrong-doer. ”

“ Trust me, none can drink of the cup of vice with impunity. But you will say, that there are qualities of so mean or so horrible a nature, as to place the man that is governed by 31them out of the pale of communion with the virtuous. Malice, cruelty, deceit, ingratitude—crimes such as these, should you think, draw down upon those convicted of them no feelings more mild than abhorrence, execration, and scorn. ”

“ On the contrary, a conscientious persistence in what is manifestly wrong should be an aggravation of the crime, for it gives an appearance of respectability to atrocity, and, when punishment overtakes the wrong-doers, makes the Thug an honoured martyr to his opinions, instead of a convicted felon for his misdeeds. ”

“ The world certainly would not have blamed them; but, as I now write in my old age, I have learned that there is a rule far above the world’s laws, and that says, “Do no wrong, or be guilty of any appearance of wrong, however important may seem the object to be gained.” ”

“ If your object be, as you have intimated, to aid you in exposing and disabling man whose antecedents have been those of guilt, and who threatens with danger the society which receives him, you must give me proofs that are not reducible to magic; and you must prepossess me against the person you accuse, not by powders and fumes that disorder the brain, but by substantial statements, such as justify one man in condemning another. ”

“ Every line you lay down is either right or wrong: it may be timidly and awkwardly wrong, or fearlessly and impudently wrong; the aspect of the impudent wrongness is pleasurable to vulgar persons, and is what they commonly call 'free' execution. ”

“ Are you sure that you have never committed wrong acts, for which you pardoned yourselves because their object was so slight, though at bottom they implied more wickedness than a crime prompted by misery or fury? ”

“ Blame them by all means; but let us be just, and having settled how much they are to blame—not a very profitable task—let us set about to find how far we are to blame; having punished them, what about punishing ourselves? ”

“ Hence it necessarily follows that all accusations concern the State or the individual, the accused having acted either ignorantly and against his will, or voluntarily and with knowledge, and in the latter case with malice aforethought or from passion. We will speak of anger when we come to treat of the passions, and we have already stated in what circumstances and with what dispositions men act with deliberate purpose. ”