TWO:But if penal laws thus express the wide variability of human morality, they also contribute to make actions moral or immoral according to the penalties by which they enforce or prevent them. For not[74] only does whatever is immoral tend to become penal, but anything can be made immoral by being first made penal; and hence indifferent actions often remain immoral long after they have ceased to be actually punishable. Thus the Jews made Sabbath-breaking equally immoral with homicide or adultery, by affixing to each of them the same capital penalty; and the former offence, though it no longer forms part of any criminal code, has still as much moral force against it as many an offence directly punishable by the law.Analogy between crime and punishment is another idea which, except in the case of death for death, has been relegated from the practice of most criminal laws. Yet the principle has in its favour the authority of Moses, the authority of the whole world and of all time, that punishment should, if possible, resemble the crime it punishes in kind; so that a man who blinds another should be blinded himself, he who disfigures another be disfigured himself. Thus in the old-world mythology, Theseus and Hercules inflict on the evil powers they conquer the same cruelties their victims were famous for; Termenus having his skull broken because with his own skull he broke the heads of others; and Busiris, who sacrificed others, being himself sacrificed in his turn. Both Montesquieu and Beccaria also advocate analogy in punishment, and so does Bentham to some degree; there being, indeed, few greater contrasts between the theories of the great English jurist and modern English practice than that the former should not have deprecated some suffering by burning as a penalty analogous to the crime of arson, and that he should have advised the transfixing of a forgers hand or of a calumniators tongue[79] by an iron instrument before the public gaze as good and efficient punishments for forgery and slander.
