That is the continuing offence which alone keeps alive the avenger's wrath against him.

His fault is not that he did the injury, for _he_ did not do it, but that he remembers it.
"It is the first principle of justice, isn't it, that nobody ought to be punished for what he can't help?
Can the man of to-day prevent or affect what he did yesterday, let me say, rather, what the man did out of whom he has grown--has grown, I repeat, by a physical process which he could not check save by suicide.

As well punish him for Adam's sin, for he might as easily have prevented that, and is every whit as accountable for it.

You pity the child born, without his choice, of depraved parents.
Pity the man himself, the man of today who, by a process as inevitable as the child's birth, has grown on the rotten stock of yesterday.

Think you, that it is not sometimes with a sense of loathing and horror unutterable, that he feels his fresh life thus inexorably knitting itself on, growing on, to that old stem?
For, mind you well, the consciousness of the man exists alone in the present day and moment.