less constant
watchfulness and suspicion, as their preservation may best require, but
they can never become an object of punishment. This is one of the few
fundamental and unalterable principles of politics.

To punish them capitally would be to make massacres. Massacres only
increase the ferocity of men, and teach them to regard their own lives
and those of others as of little value; whereas the great policy of
government is, to teach the people to think both of great importance in
the eyes of God and the state, and never to be sacrificed or even
hazarded to gratify their passions, or for anything but the duties
prescribed by the rules of morality, and under the direction of public
law and public authority. To punish them with lesser penalties would be
to debilitate the commonwealth, and make the nation miserable, which it
is the business of government to render happy and flourishing.

As to crimes, too, I would draw a strong line of limitation. For no one
offence, _politically an offence of rebellion_, by council, contrivance,
persuasion, or compulsion, for none properly a _military offence of
rebellion_, or anything done by open hostility in the field, should any
man at all be called in question; because such seems to be the proper
and natural death of civil dissensions. The offences of war are
obliterated by peace.

Another class will of course be included in the indemnity,--namely, all
those who by their activity in restoring lawful government shall
obliterate their offences. The offence previously known, the acceptance
of service is a pardon for crimes. I fear that this class of men will
not be very numerous.

So far as to indemnity. But where are the objects of justice, and of
example, and of future security to the public peace? They are naturally
pointed out, not by their having outraged political and civil laws, nor
their having rebelled against the state as a state, but by their having
rebelled against the law of Nature and outraged man as man. In this
list, all the regicides in general, all those who laid sacrilegious
hands on the king, who, without anything in their own rebellious mission
to the Convention to justify them, brought him to his trial and
unanimously voted him guilty,--all those who had a share in the cruel
murder of the queen, and the detestable proceedings with regard to the
young king and the unhappy princesses,--all those who committed
cold-blooded murder anywhere, and particularly in th