“Why,” answered his partner, “as James C. Carter pointed out, ninety-nine per cent of all law is unwritten.  What keeps most people straight is not criminal statutes but their own sense of decency, conscience or whatever you may choose to call it.  Doubtless you recall the famous saying of Diogenes Laertius:  ’There is a written and an unwritten law.  The one by which we regulate our constitutions in our cities is the written law; that which arises from custom is the unwritten law.’  I see that, of course you do!  As I was saying only the other day, infractions of good taste and of manners, civil wrongs, sins, crimes—­are in essence one and the same, differing only in degree.  Thus the man who goes out to dinner without a collar violates the laws of social usage; if he takes all his clothes off and walks the streets he commits a crime.  In a measure it simply depends on how many clothes he has on what grade of offense he commits.  From that point of view the man who is not a gentleman is in a sense a criminal.  But the law can’t make a man a gentleman.”

“I should say not!” murmured Miss Wiggin.

“Well,” continued Mr. Tutt, “we have various ways of dealing with these outlaws.  The man who violates our ideas of good taste or good manners is sent to Coventry; the man who does you a wrong is mulcted in damages; the sinner is held under the town pump and ridden out of town on a rail, or the church takes a hand and threatens him with the hereafter; but if he crosses a certain line we arrest him and lock him up—­either from public spirit or for our own private ends.”

“Hear!  Hear!” cried Tutt admiringly.

“Fundamentally there is only an arbitrary distinction between wrongs, sins and crimes.  The meanest and most detestable of men, beside whom an honest burglar is a sympathetic human being, may yet never violate a criminal statute.”

“That’s so!” said Tutt.  “Take Badger, for instance.”

“How often we defend cases,” ruminated his partner, “where the complainant is just as bad as the prisoner at the bar—­if not worse.”

“And of course,” added Tutt, “you must admit there are a lot of criminals who are criminals from perfectly good motives.  Take the man, for instance, who thrashes a bystander who insults his wife—­the man’s wife, I mean, naturally.”

“Only in those cases where we elect to take the law into our own hands we ought to be willing to accept the consequences like gentlemen and sportsmen,” commented the senior partner.

“This is all very interesting, no doubt,” remarked Miss Wiggin, “but as a matter of general information I should like to know why the criminal law doesn’t punish the sinners—­as well as the criminals.”

“I guess one reason,” replied Tutt, “is that people don’t wish to be kept from sinning.”