Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

before it weaker than a child before a full-grown man.

Therefore, in the eyes of truth and justice, these death scenes which it orders with so much preparation are but cowardly assassinations-solemn crimes committed, not by individuals, but by entire nations, with due legal forms. However cruel, however extravagant these laws may be, be not astonished. They are the handiwork of a few tyrants; they are the chains with which they load down humankind; they are the arms with which they subjugate them! They were written in blood! "It is not permitted to put to death a Roman citizen'"-this was the law that the people had adopted; but Sulla conquered and said: "All those who have borne arms against me deserve death." Octavius, and the companions of his misdeeds, confirmed this law.

Under Tiberius, to have praised Brutus was a crime worthy of death. Caligula sentenced to death those who were sacrilegious enough to disrobe before the image of the emperor. When tyranny had invented the crimes of lèsemajesté (which might be either trivial acts or heroic deeds), he who should have dared to think that they could merit a lighter penalty than death would himself have been held guilty of lèse-majesté.

When fanaticism, born of the monstrous union of ignorance and despotism, in its turn invented the crimes of lèse-majesté against God-when it thought, in its frenzy, to avenge God himself-was it not obliged to offer him blood and to place him on the level of the monsters who called themselves his images? The death penalty is necessary, say the partizans of antiquated and barbarous routine! Without it there is no restraint strong enough against crime. Who has told you so? Have you reckoned with all the springs through which penal laws can act upon human

sensibility? Alas! before death how much physical and moral suffering can not man endure!

The wish to live gives way to pride, the most imperious of all the passions which dominate the heart of man. most terrible punishment for social man is opprobrium; it is the overwhelming evidence of public execration. When the legislator can strike the citizens in so many places and in so many ways, how can he believe himself reduced to employ the death penalty? Punishments are not made to torture the guilty, but to prevent crime from fear of incurring them.

The legislator who prefers death and atrocious punishments to the mildest means within his power outrages public delicacy, and deadens the moral sentiment of the people he governs, in a way similar to that in which an awkward teacher brutalizes and degrades the mind of his pupil by the frequency of cruel chastisements. In the end, he wears and weakens the springs of government, in trying to bend them with greater force.

The legislator who establishes such a penalty renounces the wholesome principle that the most efficacious method of repressing crimes is to adapt the punishments to the character of the various passions which produce them, and to punish them, so to speak, by their own selves. He confounds all ideas, he disturbs all connections, and opposes openly the object of all penal laws.

The penalty of death is necessary, you say? If such is the case, why have several nations been able to do without it? By what fatality have these nations been the wisest, the happiest, and the freest? If the death penalty is the proper way to prevent great crimes, it must then be that they were rarer with these people who have adopted and

extended it. Now, the contrary is exactly the case. See Japan: nowhere are the death penalty and extreme punishments so frequent; nowhere are crimes so frequent and atrocious. It is as if the Japanese tried to dispute in ferocity the barbarous laws which outrage and irritate them. The republics of Greece, where punishments were moderate, where the death penalty was either very rare or absolutely unknown-did they produce more crimes or less virtues than the countries governed by the laws of blood? Do you believe that Rome was more disgraced by heinous. crimes when, in the days of her glory, the Porcian Law had abolished the severe punishments applied by the kings and by the decemvirs, than she was under Sulla, who had revived them, and under the emperors who exerted their rigor to a degree in keeping with their infamous tyranny? Has Russia suffered any upheaval since the despot who governs her suppressed entirely the death penalty, as if he wished to expiate by that act of humanity and philosophy the crime of keeping millions of men under the yoke of absolute power?

Listen to the voice of justice and of reason; it cries to us that human judgments are never certain enough to warrant society in giving death to a man convicted by other men liable to error. IIad you imagined the most perfect judicial system; had you found the most upright and enlightened judges there will always remain some room for error or prejudice. Why interdict to yourselves the means of reparation? Why condemn yourself to powerlessness to help oppressed innocence? What good can come of the sterile regrets, these illusory reparations you grant to a vain shade, to insensible ashes? They are the sad testimonials of the Darbarous temerity of your penal laws. To rob the man of

the possibility of expiating his crime by his repentance or by acts of virtue; to close to him without mercy every return toward a proper life, and his own esteem; to hasten his descent, as it were, into the grave still covered with the recent blotch of his crime-is in my eyes the most horrible refinement of cruelty.

The first duty of the lawmaker is to form and to conserve public morals, as the source of all liberty, the source of all social happiness. When, to attain some special aim, he loses sight of this general and essential object, he commits the grossest and most fatal of errors. Therefore the laws must ever present to the people the purest model of justice and of reason. If, in lieu of this puissant severity, of this moderate calmness which should characterize them, they replace it by anger and vengeance; if they cause human blood to flow which they can prevent-which they have no right to spill; if they exhibit to the eyes of the people cruel scenes and corpses bruised by tortures-then they change in the hearts of the citizens all ideas of the just and of the unjust; they cause to germinate in the bosom of society ferocious prejudices which in their turn again produce others. Man is no longer for man an object so sacred as before. One has a lower idea of his dignity when public authority makes light of his life. The idea of the murder fills us with less horror when the law itself sets the example and provides the spectacle; the horror of the crime diminishes from the time law no longer punishes it except by another crime. Have a care not to confound the efficiency of punishment with excess of severity; the one is absolutely opposed to the other. Everything favors moderate laws; everything conspires against cruel laws. It has been remarked that in free countries crimes are of rarer occur

rence and the penal laws lighter; all ideas are linked together. Free countries are those in which the rights of man are respected, and where, consequently, the laws are just. Where they offend humanity by an excess of rigor, it is a proof that there the dignity of man is not known and that the dignity of the citizen does not exist. It is a proof that the legislator is but a master who commands slaves and punishes them mercilessly according to his whim.

SIMPLICITY AND GREATNESS

BY FÉNELON

There is a simplicity that is a defect, and a simplicity that is a virtue. Simplicity may be a want of discernment. When we speak of a person as simple, we may mean that he is credulous and perhaps vulgar. The simplicity that is a virtue is something sublime-every one loves and admires it; but it is difficult to say exactly what this virtue is.

Simplicity is an uprightness of soul that has no reference to self; it is different from sincerity, and it is a still higher virtue. We see many people who are sincere, without being simple; they only wish to pass for what they are, and they are unwilling to appear what they are not; they are always thinking of themselves, measuring their words, and recalling their thoughts, and renewing their actions, from the fear that they have done too much or too little. These persons are sincere, but they are not simple; they are not at ease with others and others are not at ease with them; they are not free, ingenuous, natural; we prefer people who are less correct, less perfect, and who are less ar

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »