in our business, we have one evil more than the rest of mankind?"_
Robberies are daily committed, even at the foot of the scaffolds where
criminals are punished. In those nations, where the penalty of death is
so lightly inflicted, has sufficient attention been paid to the fact,
that society is yearly deprived of a great number of individuals who
would be able to render it very useful service, if made to work, and
thus indemnify the community for the injuries they have committed? The
facility with which the lives of men are taken away, proves the
incapacity of counsellors; is an evidence of the negligence of
legislators: they find it a much shorter road, that it gives them less
trouble to destroy the citizens than to seek after the means to render
them better.

What shall be said for the unjust cruelty of some nations, in which the
law, that ought to have for its object the advantage of the whole,
appears to be made only for the security of the most powerful? How shall
we account for the inhumanity of those societies, in which punishments
the most disproportionate to the crime, unmercifully take away the lives
of men, whom the most urgent necessity, the dreadful alternative of
famishing in a land of plenty, has obliged to become criminal? It is
thus that in a great number of civilized nations, the life of the
citizen is placed in the same scales with money; that the unhappy wretch
who is perishing from hunger, who is writhing under the most abject
misery, is put to death for having taken a pitiful portion of the
superfluity of another whom he beholds rolling in abundance! It is this
that, in many otherwise very enlightened societies, is called _justice_,
or making the punishment commensurate with the crime.

Let the man of humanity, whose tender feelings are alive to the welfare
of his species--let the moralist, who preaches virtue, who holds out