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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
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