THEFTS.
Thefts without violence should be punished by fine. He who enriches
himself at another’s expense ought to suffer at his own. But, as theft is
generally only the crime of wretchedness and despair, the crime of that
unhappy portion of mankind to whom the right of property (a terrible,
and perhaps not necessary right[67]) has left but a bare subsistence;
and as pecuniary penalties increase the number of criminals above the
number of crimes, depriving the innocent of their bread in order to give
it to the wicked, the fittest punishment will be that kind of servitude
which alone can be called just, namely, the temporary servitude of a
man’s labour and person for the compensation of society, the personal
and absolute dependence due from a man who has essayed to exercise
an unjust superiority over the social compact. But when the theft is
accompanied with violence, the punishment also should be a combination
of corporal and servile punishment. Some previous writers have shown the
evident abuse that arises from not distinguishing punishments for thefts
of violence from those for thefts of cunning, thus making an absurd
equation between a large sum of money and the life of a man. For they
are crimes of a different nature; and in politics, as in mathematics,
this axiom is most certain, that between heterogeneous quantities the
terms of difference are infinite; but it is never superfluous to repeat
what has hardly ever been put into practice. Political machinery more
than anything else retains the motion originally given to it, and is the
slowest to adapt itself to a fresh one.