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what we call an asylum (that modern sanctuary!) if we do
not like their answers. This is a strange kind of irrespon-
sibility. What we ought to say is that we can afford to be
satisfied with a less satisfactory answer from a lunatic than
from one who is not mad, because lunacy is less infectious
than crime.
We kill a serpent if we go in danger by it, simply for be-
ing such and such a serpent in such and such a place; but
we never say that the serpent has only itself to blame for not
having been a harmless creature. Its crime is that of being
the thing which it is: but this is a capital offence, and we are
right in killing it out of the way, unless we think it more
danger to do so than to let it escape; nevertheless we pity
the creature, even though we kill it.
But in the case of him whose trial I have described above,
it was impossible that any one in the court should not have
known that it was but by an accident of birth and circum-
stances that he was not himself also in a consumption; and
yet none thought that it disgraced them to hear the judge
give vent to the most cruel truisms about him. The judge
himself was a kind and thoughtful person. He was a man
of magnificent and benign presence. He was evidently of
an iron constitution, and his face wore an expression of the
maturest wisdom and experience; yet for all this, old and
learned as he was, he could not see things which one would
have thought would have been apparent even to a child. He
could not emancipate himself from, nay, it did not even oc-
cur to him to feel, the bondage of the ideas in which he had
been born and bred.

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