I know that I should think it hard to answer for what I may have done as a boy, twenty years ago.
"Yes," said the doctor, "flagrant cases of that sort take the general eye, and people say that they are instances of retribution rather than justice.

The unlikeness between the extremes of life, as between the babe and the man, the lad and the dotard, strikes every mind, and all admit that there is not any apparent identity between these widely parted points in the progress of a human organism.

How then?
How soon does identity begin to decay, and when is it gone--in one year, five years, ten years, twenty years, or how many?
Shall we fix fifty years as the period of a moral statute of limitation, after which punishment shall be deemed barbarous?
No, no.

The gulf between the man of this instant and the man of the last is just as impassable as that between the baby and the man.

What is past is eternally past.