OF PROSCRIPTION.
The second question is, whether it is expedient to place a reward on the
head of a known criminal, and to make of every citizen an executioner
by arming him against the offender. Either the criminal has fled from
his country or he is still within it. In the first case the sovereign
encourages the commission of a crime and exposes its author to a
punishment, being thereby guilty of an injury and of an usurpation of
authority in the dominions of another, and authorising other nations
to do the same by himself. In the second case the sovereign displays
his own weakness, for he who has the power wherewith to defend himself
seeks not to purchase it. Moreover, such an edict upsets all ideas of
morality and virtue, which are ever ready to vanish from the human
mind at the very slightest breath. Now the laws invite to treachery,
and anon they punish it; with one hand the legislator tightens the
bonds of the family, of kindred, and of friendship, whilst with the
other he rewards whosoever violates and despises them; always in
self-contradiction, he at one moment invites to confidence the suspicious
natures of men, and at another scatters mistrust broadcast among them.
Instead of preventing one crime, he causes a hundred. These are the
resources of weak nations, whose laws are but the temporary repairs of
a ruined building that totters throughout. In proportion as a nation
becomes enlightened, good faith and mutual confidence become necessary,
and tend ever more to identify themselves with true policy. Tricks,
intrigues, dark and indirect paths, are for the most part foreseen, and
the general quickness of all men collectively over-reaches and blunts
that of single individuals. The very ages of ignorance, in which public
morality inclines men to obey the dictates of private morality, serve
as instruction and experience for the ages of enlightenment. But laws
which reward treachery and stir up clandestine hostility by spreading
mutual suspicion among citizens, are opposed to this union of private and
public morality, a union which is so necessary, and to the observance of
which individuals might owe their happiness, nations their peace, and
the universe a somewhat longer period of quiet and repose from the evils
which at present pervade it.