such individual hardship to result from its imposition of a fallible code is not just in its government or dutiful to its neighbour. And if it so acts, it undermines in the governed their sense of its moral sanction. The State cannot so do hurt to its citizens and retain an unimpaired claim on their allegiance; nor can it with any moral decency claim reparation from its enemies abroad, if it does not make full reparation for its own miscarriages of justice at home.
"One," it is sometimes argued, "must suffer for the general good." But the general good is not so served. In this connection general good only means "general cheapness." The State, and not the citizen, must pay the price of its presumption—or it must look for an altered mind in every citizen whom it so afflicts from its position of immunity. Nay, it may be well that its supposed immunity should occasionally be disproved by a determined and self-sacrificing citizen, entirely for the general good, and the State forced to pay in extra upkeep for the bad condition of its laws.
The careless self-allowance of majorities in wrong done to minorities, or even to individuals, is not to the general good; and one could rather wish to a State that its minorities should be alert and pugnacious, than its majorities self-satisfied and indifferent on the score of mere numbers.
Numbers, uncorrected by conscience and uncontrolled by penalties, may be the cheapest,
