THREE:But, to turn from this unpleasant episode of Beccarias life, Catharine II., soon after his return to Milan, invited him to St. Petersburg, to assist in the preparation of her intended code of laws. It would seem from one of Pietro Verris letters that Beccaria was at first inclined to accept the proposal,[15] but it is improbable that any such offer would really have tempted him to exchange Italian suns for Russian snows, even if Kaunitz and Firmian had not resolved to remove the temptation, by making his talents of service at home. This they did by making him Professor of Political Economy in the Palatine School of Milan, in November 1768; and his published lectures on this subject form the largest work he ever wrote.Another way to prevent crimes is to reward virtue. On this head I notice a general silence in the laws of all nations to this day. If prizes offered by academies to the discoverers of useful truths have caused the multiplication of knowledge and of good books, why should not virtuous actions also be multiplied, by prizes distributed from the munificence of the sovereign? The money of honour ever remains unexhausted and fruitful in the hands of the legislator who wisely distributes it.
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THREE:Whoever kills himself does a lesser evil to society than he who for ever leaves the boundaries of his country, for whilst the former leaves therein all his substance, the latter transports himself together with part of his property. Nay, if the power of a community consists in the number of its members, the man who withdraws himself to join a neighbouring nation does twice as great an injury as he who simply by death deprives society of his existence. The question, therefore, reduces itself to this: whether the leaving to each member of a nation a perpetual liberty to absent himself from it be advantageous or detrimental.
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THREE:When the visit to Paris was contemplated it was a question of either not going at all or of leaving Teresa behind; there was not money enough for her to travel too. For Beccaria, though the son of a marquis and of noble origin, was not rich. When in his twenty-third year he married Teresa, his father was so opposed to the match on the score of insufficiency of fortune, that for some time after the marriage he refused to receive the young couple into his house, and they lived in considerable poverty. Appeal had even been made to the Government itself to break off, if possible, so unsuitable a match; but the lovers had their own way, of course, in the end, though it was not for some time that the domestic quarrel was healed, and then, it appears, through the mediation of Pietro Verri.It is the specific crime, not the fact that it is a second or third felony, which is injurious. Neither a community nor an individual suffer more from the commission of a crime by a man who commits it for the second time than from its commission by a man who has never committed it before. If two brothers are each robbed of a pound apiece on two several occasions, the one who is robbed each time by the same criminal suffers no more than the one who is robbed each time by different criminals. Still less is the public more injured in one case than in the other. Therefore the former brother is entitled for his second loss to no more restitution than the other, nor has any more claim on society for the infliction of a severer punishment on his behalf than that inflicted for the second loss of his brother.
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THREE:Hence both in the state of extreme political liberty and in that of extreme political subjection the ideas of honour disappear or get perfectly confused with others. For in the former the despotism of the laws renders the pursuit of the favour of others of no avail; and in the latter state the despotism of men, by destroying civil existence, reduces everybody to a precarious and temporary personality. Honour, therefore, is one of the fundamental principles of those monarchies that are a mitigated form of despotism, being to them what revolutions are to despotic States, namely, a momentary return to the state of nature, and a reminder to the chief ruler of the condition of primitive equality.
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THREE:The author of the book was a native of Milan, then part of the Austrian dominions, and under the governorship of Count Firmian, a worthy representative of the liberal despotism of Maria Theresa and her chief minister, Kaunitz. Under Firmians administration a period of beneficial reforms began for Lombardy. Agriculture was encouraged, museums and libraries extended, great works of public utility carried on. Even the Church was shorn of her privileges,[2] and before Firmian had been ten years in Lombardy all traces of ecclesiastical immunity had been destroyed; the jurisdiction of the Church, and her power to hold lands in mortmain were restricted, the right of asylum was abolished, and, above all, the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Let these few facts suffice to indicate the spirit of the immediate political surroundings in the midst of which Beccarias work appeared.
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THREE:Less dangerous personally than the theological criticism, but more pernicious to reform, was the hostile criticism that at once appeared from the thick phalanx of professional lawyers, the sound-thinking practical men. From whom only two short extracts need be rescued from oblivion, as illustrations of the objections once raised against ideas which have since become the common groundwork of all subsequent legislation, in America as well as in Europe. The first extract is from a work on criminal justice by a lawyer of Provence, who in 1770 wrote as follows:
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