It may, I think, be suspected, that this political arrogance has
sometimes found its way into legislative assemblies, and mingled with
deliberations upon property and life. A slight perusal of the laws by
which the measures of vindictive and coercive justice are established,
will discover so many disproportions between crimes and punishments,
such capricious distinctions of guilt, and such confusion of remissness
and severity, as can scarcely be believed to have been produced by
publick wisdom, sincerely and calmly studious of publick happiness.

The learned, the judicious, the pious Boerhaave relates, that he never
saw a criminal dragged to execution without asking himself, "Who knows
whether this man is not less culpable than me?" On the days when the
prisons of this city are emptied into the grave, let every spectator of
the dreadful procession put the same question to his own heart. Few
among those that crowd in thousands to the legal massacre, and look with
carelessness, perhaps with triumph, on the utmost exacerbations of human
misery, would then be able to return without horrour and dejection. For,
who can congratulate himself upon a life passed without some act more
mischievous to the peace or prosperity of others, than the theft of a
piece of money?

It has been always the practice, when any particular species of robbery
becomes prevalent and common, to endeavour its suppression by capital
denunciations. Thus one generation of malefactors is commonly cut off,
and their successors are frighted into new expedients; the art of
thievery is augmented with greater variety of fraud, and subtilized to
higher degrees of dexterity, and more occult methods of conveyance. The
law then renews the pursuit in the heat of anger, and overtakes the
offender again with death. By this practice capital inflictions are
multiplied, and crimes, very different in their degrees of enormity, are
equally subjected to the severest punishment that man has the power of
exercising upon man.

The lawgiver is undoubtedly allowed to estimate the malignity of an
offence, not merely by the loss or pain which single acts may produce,
but by the general alarm and anxiety arising from the fear of mischief,
and insecurity of possession: he therefore exercises the right which
societies are supposed to have over the lives of those that compose
them, not simply to punish a transgression, but to maintain order, and
preserve quiet; he enforces those