THE DIVISION OF PUNISHMENTS.
Some crimes tend directly to the destruction of society or to the
sovereign who represents it; others affect individual citizens, by
imperilling their life, their property, or their honour; whilst others,
again, are actions contrary to the positive or negative obligations which
bind every individual to the public weal.
Any action that is not included between the two above-indicated extremes
can only be called a _crime_ or punished as such by those who find their
interest in so calling it. The uncertainty of these limits has produced
in different nations a system of ethics contrary to the system of laws,
has produced many actual systems of laws at total variance with one
another, and a quantity of laws which expose even the wisest man to the
severest penalties. Consequently the words _virtue_ and _vice_ have
become of vague and variable meaning, and from the uncertainty thus
surrounding individual existence, listlessness and a fatal apathy have
spread over political communities.
The opinion that each citizen should have liberty to do whatsoever is
not contrary to the laws, without fear of any other inconvenience than
such as may arise from the action itself—this is the political dogma
that should be believed by the people and promulgated by the chief
magistrates, a dogma as sacred as that of the incorrupt guardianship
of the laws, without which there can be no legitimate society; a just
compensation to mankind for their sacrifice of that entire liberty of
action which belongs to every sensitive being, and is only limited by the
extent of its force. This it is that forms liberal and vigorous souls,
and enlightened minds; that makes men virtuous with that virtue which can
resist fear, and not with that flexible kind of prudence which is only
worthy of a man who can put up with a precarious and uncertain existence.
Whosoever will read with a philosophical eye the codes and annals of
different nations will find almost always that the names of _virtue_ and
_vice_, of _good citizen_ and _criminal_, are changed in the course of
ages, not in accordance with the changes that occur in the circumstances
of a country, and consequently in conformity with the general interest,
but in accordance with the passions and errors that have swayed different
legislators in succession. He will observe full often, that the passions
of one age form the basis of the morality of later ones; that strong
passions, the offspring of fanaticism and enthusiasm, weakened and, so
to speak, gnawed away by time (which reduces to a level all physical and
moral phenomena) become little by little the prudence of the age, and a
useful instrument in the hand of the strong man and the clever. In this
way the vaguest notions of honour and virtue have been produced; for they
change with the changes of time, which causes names to survive things; as
also with the changes of rivers and mountains, which form frequently the
boundaries of moral no less than of physical geography.