Page:Sphere and Duties of Government.djvu/180

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SPHERE AND DUTIES OF GOVERNMENT.

tain it might be that this punishment alone, and no milder one whatever, would be efficacious. There is manifestly an intimate connection in human ideas between the internal feeling of right and the enjoyment of external happiness, and the former seems to man to entitle him to the latter. Whether this expectation is justified by the happiness which fate accords him, is a more doubtful question, but cannot be discussed in this place. But with respect to that enjoyment which others can arbitrarily give or take away from him, his right to it must perforce be acknowledged, while however that principle seems de facto to deny it.

But, further, this scale is hurtful even to security itself. For although it may enforce obedience to this or that particular law, it disturbs and confuses precisely that which is the mainstay of the security of the citizens in a State, viz. the feeling of morality, in causing a struggle between the treatment a criminal meets with, and his own consciousness of his guilt. The only sure and infallible means of preventing crime is to secure a due regard to the rights of others; and this object is never gained unless every one who attacks those rights is in the same measure hindered in the exercise of his own. For it is only by such a correspondency that harmony is preserved between man's internal moral development and the success of political arrangements, without which even the most artificial legislation will always fail in its end. How much the attainment of all other objects which man proposes to his endeavours, would sutler from the adoption of such a scale as that to which we referred—how much it contradicts all the principles laid down in this essay, it is needless for me to show. Again, the equality or correspondency between crime and punishment which is demanded by the reasons we have developed, cannot be absolutely determined; we cannot decide in a general way that this or that crime is just deserving of this or that particular