ONE: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.Would you prevent crimes, then see that enlightenment accompanies liberty. The evils that flow from knowledge are in inverse ratio to its diffusion; the benefits directly proportioned to it. A bold impostor, who is never a commonplace man, is adored by an ignorant people, despised by an enlightened one. Knowledge, by facilitating comparisons between objects and multiplying mens points of view, brings many different notions into contrast, causing them to modify one another, all the more easily as the same views and the same difficulties are observed in others. In the face of a widely diffused national enlightenment the calumnies of ignorance are silent, and authority, disarmed of pretexts for its manifestation, trembles; whilst the rigorous force of the laws remains unshaken, no one of education having any dislike to the clear and useful public compacts which secure the common safety, when he compares the trifling and useless liberty sacrificed by himself with the sum-total of all the liberties sacrificed by others, who without the laws might have been hostile to himself. Whoever has a sensitive soul, when he contemplates a code of well-made laws, and finds that he has only lost the pernicious liberty of injuring others, will feel[246] himself constrained to bless the throne and the monarch that sits upon it.
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ONE:Some persons have maintained that a crime, that is, an action contrary to the laws, is punishable wherever committed, as if the character of subject[193] were indelible, or, in other words, synonymous with, nay, worse than, the character of slave; as if a man could be the subject of one kingdom and the resident of another, or as if his actions could without contradiction be subordinate to two sovereign powers and to two legal systems often contradictory. So some think that a cruel action done, say, at Constantinople is punishable at Paris, for the abstract reason that he who offends humanity deserves to have collective humanity for his enemy, and merits universal execration; as if judges were the avengers of human sensibility in general, and not rather of the covenants that bind men together. The place of punishment is the place of the crime, because there, and there only, is it a compulsory duty to injure an individual, to prevent an injury to the public. A villain, but one who has not broken the covenants of the society of which he was not a member, may be an object of fear, and for that reason be expelled and exiled by the superior power of that society; but he cannot be legally and formally punished, since it is for the laws to avenge, not the intrinsic malice of particular actions, but the violation of compacts.Men oppose the strongest barriers against open tyranny, but they see not the imperceptible insect, which gnaws them away, and makes for the invading stream an opening that is all the more sure by very reason of its concealment from view.
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ONE:The greater the number of those who understand and have in their hands the sacred code of the laws, the fewer will be the crimes committed; for it is beyond all doubt that ignorance and uncertainty of punishments lend assistance to the eloquence of the passions. Yet what shall we think of mankind, when we reflect, that such a condition of the laws is the inveterate custom of a large part of cultivated and enlightened Europe?
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ONE:One thing that might be done, which would also serve at the same time to keep a prisoners family from want, the main source of crime, would be the formation of a Prisoners Fund, for his and their benefit. For this there is a precedent in a quite recent Act. For the Act, which abolished the forfeiture of a felons property, enabled the Crown to appoint an administrator of it, for the benefit of the persons injured by the crime and the felons family, the property itself and its income reverting ultimately to the convict or to his representatives. There could, however, be no objection in justice to the forfeiture of a proportionate part of every felons property, such forfeiture to be dedicated to the formation of a fund, out of which assistance should be given, both to the families of prisoners during their custody and to the prisoners themselves on their discharge.[62] Such a fund might be still further increased by the substitution of a lien on a mans wages or income for many minor offences now punished, but not prevented, by imprisonment.
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ONE:Lastly, a witnesss evidence is almost null when spoken words are construed into a crime. For the tone, the gesture, all that precedes or follows the different ideas attached by men to the same words, so alter and modify a mans utterances, that it is almost impossible to repeat them exactly as they were spoken. Moreover, actions of a violent and unusual character, such as real crimes are, leave their traces in the numberless circumstances and effects that flow from them; and of such actions the greater the number of the circumstances adduced in proof, the more numerous are the chances for the accused to clear himself. But words only remain in the memory of their hearers, and memory is for the most part unfaithful and often deceitful. It is on that account ever so much more easy to fix a calumny upon a mans words than upon his actions.CHAPTER XXXIII. OF THE PUBLIC TRANQUILLITY.
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