[1] Cruelty, it has been said, is a good deal owing to laziness. It is more comfortable to sit in the shade rubbing red pepper into a man’s eyes to make him confess than to run about in the sun collecting evidence. I quote from memory, from a lecture, I think, by Mr. Leslie Stephen.
A public act which inflicts loss, such as war, confiscation, the repudiation of a debt, is wholly different from murder or theft. It is not the act of a private person. It is not a violation of law. [1] It can hardly be motived by private malice or cupidity in the strict sense, and it is not a breach of an established moral order by a being within it and dependent upon it for the organisation and protection of his daily life. It is the act of a supreme power, which has ultimate responsibility for protecting the form of life of which it is the guardian, and which is not itself protected by any scheme of functions or relations, such as prescribes a course for the reconciliation of rights and secures its effectiveness. The means adopted by such a supreme power to discharge its responsibilities as a whole, are of course subject to criticism as respects the conception of good which they { 327} imply and their appropriateness to the task of realising it. But it is mere confusion to apply to them names borrowed from analogous acts of individuals within communities, to impute them, as it were, to individuals under dyslogistic predicates and to pass moral judgment upon them in the same sense as on private acts. The nearest approach which we can imagine to public immorality would be when the organs which act for the State, as such, exhibit in their public action, on its behalf, a narrow, selfish or brutal [2] conception of the interest of the State as a whole, in which, so far as can be judged, public opinion at the time agrees. In such a case the State, as such, may really be said to be acting immorally, _i.e._ in contravention of its main duty to sustain the conditions of as much good life as possible. This case must be distinguished, if I am right, from the case in which the individuals, acting as the public authority, are corrupted in their own private interests [3] not shared with the public. For then the case would rather be that the State, the organ of the public good, had not been given a chance to speak, but had simply been defrauded by those who spoke in its name.