ASYLUMS OF REFUGE.
There remain two questions for me to examine: the first, whether asylums
of refuge are just, and whether international agreements of extradition
are expedient or not. There should be no spot within the boundaries of
any country independent of the laws. Every citizen should be followed
by their power, as every substance is followed by its shadow. There is
only a difference of degree between impunity and the right of asylum;
and as the effective influence of punishment consists more in its
inevitability than in its violence, asylums do more to invite to crimes
than punishments do to deter from them. The multiplication of asylums is
the formation of so many petty sovereignties; for where there are no laws
to command, there it is easy for new laws, opposed to the general laws of
a country, to be formed, and consequently for a spirit opposed to that of
the whole collective social body to arise. All history shows that from
asylums have issued great revolutions in States and in the opinions of
mankind.
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 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.
But whether the international extradition of criminals be useful I would
not venture to decide, until laws more in conformity with the needs of
humanity, until milder penalties, and until the emancipation of law from
the caprice of mere opinion, shall have given security to oppressed
innocence and hated virtue; until tyranny shall have been confined,
by the force of universal reason which ever more and more unites the
interests of kings and subjects, to the vast plains of Asia; however much
the conviction of finding nowhere a span of earth where real crimes were
pardoned might be the most efficacious way of preventing their occurrence.