THE PREVENTION OF CRIMES—OF KNOWLEDGE—MAGISTRATES—REWARDS—EDUCATION.
It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them. This is the chief
aim of every good system of legislation, which is the art of leading men
to the greatest possible happiness or to the least possible misery,
according to calculation of all the goods and evils of life. But the
means hitherto employed for this end are for the most part false and
contrary to the end proposed. It is impossible to reduce the turbulent
activity of men to a geometrical harmony without any irregularity
or confusion. As the constant and most simple laws of nature do not
prevent aberrations in the movements of the planets, so, in the infinite
and contradictory attractions of pleasure and pain, disturbances and
disorder cannot be prevented by human laws. Yet this is the chimera
that narrow-minded men pursue, when they have power in their hands. To
prohibit a number of indifferent acts is not to prevent the crimes that
may arise from them, but it is to create new ones from them; it is to
give capricious definitions of virtue and vice which are proclaimed as
eternal and immutable in their nature. To what should we be reduced if
everything had to be forbidden us which might tempt us to a crime? It
would be necessary to deprive a man of the use of his senses. For one
motive that drives men to commit a real crime there are a thousand that
drive them to the commission of those indifferent acts which are called
crimes by bad laws; and if the likelihood of crimes is proportioned to
the number of motives to commit them, an increase of the field of crimes
is an increase of the likelihood of their commission. The majority
of laws are nothing but privileges, or a tribute paid by all to the
convenience of some few.
Would you prevent crimes, then cause the laws to be clear and simple,
bring the whole force of a nation to bear on their defence, and suffer no
part of it to be busied in overthrowing them. Make the laws to favour not
so much classes of men as men themselves. Cause men to fear the laws and
the laws alone. Salutary is the fear of the law, but fatal and fertile in
crime is the fear of one man of another. Men as slaves are more sensual,
more immoral, more cruel than free men; and, whilst the latter give their
minds to the sciences or to the interests of their country, setting
great objects before them as their model, the former, contented with the
passing day, seek in the excitement of libertinage a distraction from
the nothingness of their existence, and, accustomed to an uncertainty
of result in everything, they look upon the result of their crimes
as uncertain too, and so decide in favour of the passion that tempts
them. If uncertainty of the laws affects a nation, rendered indolent
by its climate, its indolence and stupidity is thereby maintained and
increased; if it affects a nation, which though fond of pleasure is
also full of energy, it wastes that energy in a number of petty cabals
and intrigues, which spread distrust in every heart, and make treachery
and dissimulation the foundation of prudence; if, again, it affects a
courageous and brave nation, the uncertainty is ultimately destroyed,
after many oscillations from liberty to servitude, and from servitude
back again to liberty.
Would you prevent crimes, then see that enlightenment accompanies
liberty. The evils that flow from knowledge are in inverse ratio to its
diffusion; the benefits directly proportioned to it. A bold impostor, who
is never a commonplace man, is adored by an ignorant people, despised
by an enlightened one. Knowledge, by facilitating comparisons between
objects and multiplying men’s points of view, brings many different
notions into contrast, causing them to modify one another, all the
more easily as the same views and the same difficulties are observed
in others. In the face of a widely diffused national enlightenment the
calumnies of ignorance are silent, and authority, disarmed of pretexts
for its manifestation, trembles; whilst the rigorous force of the laws
remains unshaken, no one of education having any dislike to the clear and
useful public compacts which secure the common safety, when he compares
the trifling and useless liberty sacrificed by himself with the sum-total
of all the liberties sacrificed by others, who without the laws might
have been hostile to himself. Whoever has a sensitive soul, when he
contemplates a code of well-made laws, and finds that he has only lost
the pernicious liberty of injuring others, will feel himself constrained
to bless the throne and the monarch that sits upon it.
It is not true that the sciences have always been injurious to mankind;
when they were so, it was an inevitable evil. The multiplication of
the human race over the face of the earth introduced war, the ruder
arts, and the first laws, mere temporary agreements which perished with
the necessity that gave rise to them. This was mankind’s primitive
philosophy, the few elements of which were just, because the indolence
and slight wisdom of their framers preserved them from error. But with
the multiplication of men there went ever a multiplication of their
wants. Stronger and more lasting impressions were, therefore, needed,
in order to turn them back from repeated lapses to that primitive state
of disunion which each return to it rendered worse. Those primitive
delusions, therefore, which peopled the earth with false divinities and
created an invisible universe that governed our own, conferred a great
benefit—I mean a great political benefit—upon humanity. Those men were
benefactors of their kind, who dared to deceive them and drag them,
docile and ignorant, to worship at the altars. By presenting to them
objects that lay beyond the scope of sense and fled from their grasp
the nearer they seemed to approach them—never despised, because never
well understood—they concentrated their divided passions upon a single
object of supreme interest to them. These were the first steps of all
the nations that formed themselves out of savage tribes; this was the
epoch when larger communities were formed, and such was their necessary
and perhaps their only bond. I say nothing of that chosen people of God,
for whom the most extraordinary miracles and the most signal favours were
a substitute for human policy. But as it is the quality of error to fall
into infinite subdivisions, so the sciences that grew out of it made
of mankind a blind fanatical multitude, which, shut up within a close
labyrinth, collides together in such confusion, that some sensitive and
philosophical minds have regretted to this day the ancient savage state.
That is the first epoch in which the sciences or rather opinions are
injurious.
The second epoch of history consists in the hard and terrible transition
from errors to truth, from the darkness of ignorance to the light. The
great clash between the errors which are serviceable to a few men of
power and the truths which are serviceable to the weak and the many, and
the contact and fermentation of the passions at such a period aroused,
are a source of infinite evils to unhappy humanity. Whoever ponders on
the different histories of the world, which after certain intervals
of time are so much alike in their principal episodes, will therein
frequently observe the sacrifice of a whole generation to the welfare
of succeeding ones, in the painful but necessary transition from the
darkness of ignorance to the light of philosophy, and from despotism to
freedom, which result from the sacrifice. But when truth, whose progress
at first is slow and afterwards rapid (after men’s minds have calmed down
and the fire is quenched that purged a nation of the evils it suffered),
sits as the companion of kings upon the throne, and is reverenced and
worshipped in the parliaments of free governments, who will ever dare
assert that the light which enlightens the people is more injurious than
darkness, and that acknowledging the true and simple relations of things
is pernicious to mankind?
If blind ignorance is less pernicious than confused half-knowledge,
since the latter adds to the evils of ignorance those of error, which
is unavoidable in a narrow view of the limits of truth, the most
precious gift that a sovereign can make to himself or to his people
is an enlightened man as the trustee and guardian of the sacred laws.
Accustomed to see the truth and not to fear it; independent for the most
part of the demands of reputation, which are never completely satisfied
and put most men’s virtue to a trial; used to consider humanity from
higher points of view; such a man regards his own nation as a family of
men and of brothers, and the distance between the nobles and the people
seems to him so much the less as he has before his mind the larger total
of the whole human species. Philosophers acquire wants and interests
unknown to the generality of men, but that one above all others, of not
belying in public the principles they have taught in obscurity, and they
gain the habit of loving the truth for its own sake. A selection of
such men makes the happiness of a people, but a happiness which is only
transitory, unless good laws so increase their number as to lessen the
probability, always considerable, of an unfortunate choice.
Another way of preventing crimes is to interest the magistrates who carry
out the laws in seeking rather to preserve than to corrupt them. The
greater the number of men who compose the magistracy, the less danger
will there be of their exercising any undue power over the laws; for
venality is more difficult among men who are under the close observation
of one another, and their inducement to increase their individual
authority diminishes in proportion to the smallness of the share of it
that can fall to each of them, especially when they compare it with
the risk of the attempt. If the sovereign accustoms his subjects, by
formalities and pomp, by severe edicts, and by refusal to hear the
grievances, whether just or unjust, of the man who thinks himself
oppressed, to fear rather the magistrates than the laws, it will be more
to the profit of the magistrates than to the gain of private and public
security.
Another way to prevent crimes is to reward virtue. On this head I notice
a general silence in the laws of all nations to this day. If prizes
offered by academies to the discoverers of useful truths have caused the
multiplication of knowledge and of good books, why should not virtuous
actions also be multiplied, by prizes distributed from the munificence of
the sovereign? The money of honour ever remains unexhausted and fruitful
in the hands of the legislator who wisely distributes it.
Lastly, the surest but most difficult means of preventing crimes is
to improve education—a subject too vast for present discussion, and
lying beyond the limits of my treatise; a subject, I will also say,
too intimately connected with the nature of government for it ever to
be aught but a barren field, only cultivated here and there by a few
philosophers, down to the remotest ages of public prosperity. A great
man, who enlightens the humanity that persecutes him, has shown in detail
the chief educational maxims of real utility to mankind; namely, that it
consists less in a barren multiplicity of subjects than in their choice
selection; in substituting originals for copies in the moral as in the
physical phenomena presented by chance or intention to the fresh minds of
youth; in inclining them to virtue by the easy path of feeling; and in
deterring them from evil by the sure path of necessity and disadvantage,
not by the uncertain method of command, which never obtains more than a
simulated and transitory obedience.