6.8. 8. Of the Severity of Punishments in different Governments.
The severity of punishments is fitter for despotic governments,
whose principle is terror, than for a monarchy or a republic, whose
spring is honour and virtue.
In moderate governments, the love of one's country, shame, and the
fear of blame are restraining motives, capable of preventing a multitude
of crimes. Here the greatest punishment of a bad action is conviction.
The civil laws have therefore a softer way of correcting, and do not
require so much force and severity.
In those states a good legislator is less bent upon punishing than
preventing crimes; he is more attentive to inspire good morals than to
inflict penalties.
It is a constant remark of the Chinese authors
[24]
that the more the penal laws were increased in their empire, the nearer they drew towards
a revolution. This is because punishments were augmented in proportion
as the public morals were corrupted.
It would be an easy matter to prove that in all, or almost all, the
governments of Europe, penalties have increased or diminished in
proportion as those governments favoured or discouraged liberty.
In despotic governments, people are so unhappy as to have a greater
dread of death than regret for the loss of life; consequently their
punishments ought to be more severe. In moderate states they are more
afraid of losing their lives than apprehensive of the pain of dying;
those punishments, therefore, which deprive them simply of life are
sufficient.
Men in excess of happiness or misery are equally inclinable to
severity; witness conquerors and monks. It is mediocrity alone, and a
mixture of prosperous and adverse fortune, that inspires us with lenity
and pity.
What we see practised by individuals is equally observable in regard
to nations. In countries inhabited by savages who lead a very hard life,
and in despotic governments, where there is only one person on whom
fortune lavishes her favours, while the miserable subjects lie exposed
to her insults, people are equally cruel. Lenity reigns in moderate
governments.
When in reading history we observe the cruelty of the sultans in
administration of justice, we shudder at the very thought of the
miseries of human nature.
In moderate governments, a good legislator may make use of
everything by way of punishment. Is it not very extraordinary that one
of the chief penalties at Sparta was to deprive a person of the power of
lending out his wife, or of receiving the wife of another man, and to
oblige him to have no company at home but virgins? In short, whatever
the law calls a punishment is such effectively.
Footnotes
[24]
I shall show hereafter that China is, in this respect, in the
same case as a republic or a monarchy.
