TWO:But commerce and the interchange of the pleasures of luxury have this drawback, that however many persons are engaged in their production, they yet begin and end with a few, the great majority of men only enjoying the smallest share of them, so that the feeling of misery, which depends more on comparison than on reality, is not prevented. But the principal basis of this happiness I speak of is personal security and liberty under the limitations of the law; with these the pleasures of luxury favour population, and without them they become the instrument of tyranny. As the noblest wild beasts and the freest birds remove to solitudes and inaccessible forests, leaving the fertile and smiling plains to the wiles of man, so men fly from pleasures themselves when tyranny acts as their distributor. Some remnants of the laws of an ancient conquering people, which a prince who reigned in Constantinople some 1,200 years ago caused to be compiled, mixed up afterwards with Lombard rites and packed in the miscellaneous volumes of private and obscure commentatorsthese are what form that set of traditional opinions which from a great part of Europe receive nevertheless the name of laws; and to this day it is a fact, as disastrous as it is common, that some opinion of Carpzovius, some old custom pointed out by Clarus, or some form of torture suggested in terms of complacent ferocity by Farinaccius, constitute the laws, so carelessly followed by those, who in all trembling ought to exercise their government over the lives and fortunes of men. These laws, the dregs of the most barbarous ages, are examined in this book in so far as regards criminal jurisprudence, and I have dared to expose their faults to the directors of the public happiness in a style which may keep at[112] a distance the unenlightened and intolerant multitude. The spirit of frank inquiry after truth, of freedom from commonplace opinions, in which this book is written, is a result of the mild and enlightened Government under which the Author lives. The great monarchs, the benefactors of humanity, who are now our rulers, love the truths expounded, with force but without fanaticism, by the obscure philosopher, who is only roused to indignation by the excesses of tyranny, but is restrained by reason; and existing abuses, for whosoever well studies all the circumstances, are the satire and reproach of past ages, and by no means of the present age or of its lawgivers.
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