FORE:What should we think of a government that has no other means than fear for keeping men in a country, to which they are naturally attached from the earliest impressions of their infancy? The surest way of keeping them in their country is to augment the relative welfare of each of them. As every effort should be employed to turn the balance of commerce in our own favour, so it is the greatest interest of a sovereign and a nation, that the sum of happiness, compared with that of neighbouring nations, should be greater at home than elsewhere. The pleasures of luxury are not the principal elements in this happiness, however much they may be a necessary remedy to that inequality which increases with a countrys progress, and a check upon the tendency of wealth to accumulate in the hands of a single ruler.[69]
FORE:
FORE:Need it be said that the House of Lords paused, as they were entreated to do, and that they paused and paused again, in a manner more suggestive of the full stop than the comma, generally out of deference to the same authority? Romilly was indignant that so many prelates voted against his bills; but could they have done otherwise, when the best legal authorities in England urged that it would be fatal to vote for them?when they were gravely told that if a certain bill passed, they would not know whether they stood on their heads or on their feet?I know that those general principles which tend to enlighten and improve the human race are not absolutely useless that the enlightenment of nations is not without some effect on their rulers provided that the prerogative of the latter, their power, their security, their authority, their safety, is not touched thereby. I know well that this general enlightenment, so much boasted of, is a beautiful and glorious chimera, with which philosophers love to amuse themselves, but which would soon disappear if they would open history, and see therefrom to what causes improved institutions are due. The nations of antiquity have passed, and those of the present will pass, before philosophy and its influence have reformed a single government.
THREE:In such a zigzag path has our penal legislation been feeling, and is still feeling, its way, with evident misgiving of that principle of repression, as false as it is old, that an increase of crime can only be met by an increase of punishment.
THREE:CHAPTER XIV. CRIMINAL ATTEMPTS, ACCOMPLICES, IMPUNITY.
