Excluding all idea of punishment in the proper sense of the word, it remains only to consider such coercion as is used against persons convicted of injurious action in the past, for the purpose of preventing future mischief. Godwin now invites us to consider the futility of coercion as a means of reforming, or as he would say, "enlightening the understanding" of a man who has erred. Our aim is to bring him to the acceptance of our conception of duty. Assuming that we possess more of eternal justice than he, do we shrink from setting our wit against his? Instead of acting as his preceptor we become his tyrant. Coercion first annihilates the understanding of its victim, and then of him who adopts it. Dressed in the supine prerogatives of a master, he is excused from cultivating the faculties of a man. Coercion begins by producing pain, by violently alienating the mind from the truth with which we wish it to be impressed. It includes a tacit confession of imbecility.
With some hesitation Godwin allows the use of force to restrain a man found in actual violence. We may not have time to reason with him. But even for self-defence there are other resources. "The powers of the mind are yet unfathomed." He tells the story of Marius, who overawed the soldier sent into his cell to execute him, with the words, "Wretch, have you the temerity to kill Marius?" Were we all accustomed to place an intrepid confidence in the unaided energy of the intellect, to despise force in others and to refuse to employ it ourselves, who shall say how far the species might be improved? But punitive coercion deals only with a man whose violence is over. The only rational excuse for it is to restrain a man from further violence which he will presumably commit. Godwin condemns capital punishment as excessive, since restraint can be attained without it, and corporal chastisement as an offence against the dignity of the human mind. Let there be nothing in the state of transition worse than simple imprisonment. Godwin, however, dissents vehemently from Howard's invention of solitary confinement, designed to shield the prisoner from the contamination of his fellow criminals. Man is a social animal and virtue depends on social relations. As a preliminary to acquiring it is he to be shut out from the society of his fellows? How shall he exercise benevolence or justice in his cell? Will his heart become softened or expand who breathes the atmosphere of a dungeon? Solitary confinement is the bitterest torment that human ingenuity can inflict. The least objectionable method of depriving a criminal of the power to harm society is banishment or transportation. Expose him to the stimulus of necessity in an unsettled country. New conditions make new minds. But the whole attempt to apply law breaks down. You must heap edict on edict, and to make your laws fit your cases, must either for ever wrest them or make new ones. Law does not end uncertainty, and it debilitates the mind. So long as men are habituated to look to foreign guidance and external rules for direction, so long the vigour of their minds will sleep.
