SUICIDE AND ABSENCE.
Suicide is a crime to which a punishment properly so called seems
inadmissible, since it can only fall upon the innocent or else upon a
cold and insensible body. If the latter mode of punishing the crime
makes no more impression on the living than would be made by inflicting
violence on a statue, the other mode is unjust and tyrannical, inasmuch
as political freedom necessarily presupposes the purely personal
nature of punishment. Men love life only too much, and everything
that surrounds them confirms them in this love. The seductive image of
pleasure, and hope, that sweetest illusion of mortals, for the sake of
which they swallow large draughts of evil mixed with a few drops of
contentment, are too attractive, for one ever to fear, that the necessary
impunity of such a crime should exercise any general influence. He who
fears pain, obeys the laws; but death puts an end in the body to all the
sources of pain. What, then, will be the motive which shall restrain the
desperate hand of the suicide?
Whoever kills himself does a lesser evil to society than he who for
ever leaves the boundaries of his country, for whilst the former leaves
therein all his substance, the latter transports himself together
with part of his property. Nay, if the power of a community consists
in the number of its members, the man who withdraws himself to join
a neighbouring nation does twice as great an injury as he who simply
by death deprives society of his existence. The question, therefore,
reduces itself to this: whether the leaving to each member of a nation
a perpetual liberty to absent himself from it be advantageous or
detrimental.
No law ought to be promulgated that has not force to back it, or that the
nature of things deprives of validity; and as minds are ruled by opinion,
which itself follows the slow and indirect impressions of legislation,
whilst it resists those that are direct and violent, the most salutary
laws become infected with the contempt felt for useless laws, and are
regarded rather as obstacles to be surmounted than as the deposit of the
public welfare.
Moreover, if, as was said, our feelings are limited in quantity, the
greater respect men may have for things outside the laws, the less will
remain to them for the laws themselves. From this principle the wise
administrator of the public happiness may draw some useful consequences,
the exposition of which would lead me too far from my subject, which is
to demonstrate the uselessness of making a prison of the State. A law
with such an object is useless, because, unless inaccessible rocks or
an unnavigable sea separate a country from all others, how will it be
possible to close all the points of its circumference and keep guard over
the guardians themselves? A man who transports everything he has with
him, when he has done so cannot be punished. Such a crime once committed
can no longer be punished, and to punish it beforehand would be to punish
men’s wills, not their actions, to exercise command over their intention,
the freest part of human nature, and altogether independent of the
control of human laws. The punishment of an absent man in the property he
leaves behind him would ruin all international commerce, to say nothing
of the facility of collusion, which would be unavoidable, except by a
tyrannical control of contracts. And his punishment on his return, as a
criminal, would prevent the reparation of the evil done to society, by
making all removals perpetual. The very prohibition to leave a country
augments people’s desire to do so, and is a warning to foreigners not to
enter it.
What should we think of a government that has no other means than fear
for keeping men in a country, to which they are naturally attached from
the earliest impressions of their infancy? The surest way of keeping them
in their country is to augment the relative welfare of each of them. As
every effort should be employed to turn the balance of commerce in our
own favour, so it is the greatest interest of a sovereign and a nation,
that the sum of happiness, compared with that of neighbouring nations,
should be greater at home than elsewhere. The pleasures of luxury are
not the principal elements in this happiness, however much they may be
a necessary remedy to that inequality which increases with a country’s
progress, and a check upon the tendency of wealth to accumulate in the
hands of a single ruler.[69]
But commerce and the interchange of the pleasures of luxury have this
drawback, that however many persons are engaged in their production, they
yet begin and end with a few, the great majority of men only enjoying
the smallest share of them, so that the feeling of misery, which depends
more on comparison than on reality, is not prevented. But the principal
basis of this happiness I speak of is personal security and liberty under
the limitations of the law; with these the pleasures of luxury favour
population, and without them they become the instrument of tyranny. As
the noblest wild beasts and the freest birds remove to solitudes and
inaccessible forests, leaving the fertile and smiling plains to the wiles
of man, so men fly from pleasures themselves when tyranny acts as their
distributor.
It is, then, proved that the law which imprisons subjects in their own
country is useless and unjust. The punishment, therefore, of suicide is
equally so; and consequently, although it is a fault punishable by God,
for He alone can punish after death, it is not a crime in the eyes of
men, for the punishment they inflict, instead of falling on the criminal
himself, falls on his family. If anyone objects, that such a punishment
can nevertheless draw a man back from his determination to kill himself,
I reply, that he who calmly renounces the advantages of life, who hates
his existence here below to such an extent as to prefer to it an eternity
of misery, is not likely to be moved by the less efficacious and more
remote consideration of his children or his relations.