OBSCURITY OF THE LAWS.
If the interpretation of laws is an evil, it is clear that their
obscurity, which necessarily involves interpretation, must be an evil
also, and an evil which will be at its worst where the laws are written
in any other than the vernacular language of a country. For in that case
the people, being unable to judge of themselves how it may fare with
their liberty or their limbs, are made dependent on a small class of men;
and a book, which should be sacred and open to all, becomes, by virtue of
its language, a private and, so to speak, a family manual.
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?
One consequence of these last reflections is, that without writing no
society will ever assume a fixed form of government, wherein the power
shall belong to the social whole, and not to its parts, and wherein the
laws, only alterable by the general will, shall not suffer corruption
in their passage through the crowd of private interests. Experience
and reason have taught us, that the probability and certainty of human
traditions diminish in proportion to their distance from their source. So
that if there be no standing memorial of the social contract, how will
laws ever resist the inevitable force of time and passion?
From this we see how useful is the art of printing, which makes the
public, and not a few individuals, the guardians of the sacred laws, and
which has scattered that dark spirit of cabal and intrigue, destined to
disappear before knowledge and the sciences, which, however apparently
despised, are in reality feared by those that follow in their wake. This
is the reason that we see in Europe the diminution of those atrocious
crimes that afflicted our ancestors and rendered them by turns tyrants
or slaves. Whoever knows the history of two or three centuries ago and
of our own, can see that from the lap of luxury and effeminacy have
sprung the most pleasing of all human virtues, humanity, charity, and the
toleration of human errors; he will know what have been the results of
that which is so wrongly called ‘old-fashioned simplicity and honesty.’
Humanity groaning under implacable superstition; the avarice and ambition
of a few dyeing with human blood the golden chests and thrones of kings;
secret assassinations and public massacres; every noble a tyrant to the
people; the ministers of the Gospel truth polluting with blood hands that
every day came in contact with the God of mercy—these are not the works
of this enlightened age, which some, however, call corrupt.