Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: don of an existing desire ? are the questions, which Philosophy always will, and every Legislator, instead of yielding to the impulses of passion, always ought to propose to himself, before he sanctions or enacts any punishment. Questions which require great knowledge of human nature, deep insight into the springs of human action, to answer. These three causes concurring; the difficulty of awakening the mind; the injury to worldly interests, and the abstruseness of the enquiry, will, therefore, always be temporary obstacles to the advancement of the science of criminal legislation. I am aware of this; but I do not, I never did, despair. I see the progress which has been made during the last thirty years; and I think I am not mistaken in saying, that there is aspirit moving upon this happy country, which will never be still, until it has subdued this enemy under its feet. I am aware, too, that the punishment of death may, possibly, be proper in many cases where it appears to me to be injurious; but, assuming it to be right that a fellow-creature who has erred and strayed, although his crime has not been attended with any cruelty, should, in the possession of his faculties and his strength; in the bloom of youth, or the perfection of manhood; in the full career of unrepented crime or the bitter sorrow of deep contrition, be consigned to the grave; ought we not in these enlightened times, to know the reasons upon which the necessity is founded ? Ought we not to ask ourselves, why the offender is put to death ? Is it to prevent his repeating the crime ? or to deter others ? or ought we, without any meditation, to surrender ourselves to opinions formed in distant ages, when laws were made without any consideration of the proportions between crime and punishment, with suc…
