loses its effect; it
should not, therefore, be used as a common punishment for slight
faults. Nor should we trust very early in education to the delicate
secret influence of conscience; but we should take every precaution to
prevent the necessity of having recourse to the punishment of
disgrace; and we must, if we mean to preserve the power of conscience,
take care that it be never disregarded with impunity. We must avoid
opposing it to strong temptation; nor should we ever try the integrity
of children, except in situations where we can be perfectly certain of
the result of the experiment. We must neither run the risk of
injuring them by unjust suspicions, nor unmerited confidence. By
prudent arrangements, and by unremitted daily attention, we should
absolutely prevent the possibility of deceit. By giving few commands,
or prohibitions, we may avoid the danger of either secret or open
disobedience. By diminishing temptations to do wrong, we act more
humanely than by multiplying restraints and punishments.

It has been found, that no restraints or punishments have proved
adequate to ensure obedience to laws, whenever strong temptations, and
many probabilities of evasion, combine in opposition to conscience or
fear. The terrors of the law have been for years ineffectually
directed against a race of beings called smugglers: yet smuggling is
still an extensive, lucrative, and not universally discreditable,
profession. Let any person look into the history of the excise
laws,[66] and he will be astonished at the accumulation of penal
statutes, which the active, but ineffectual, ingenuity of prohibitory
legislators has devised in the course of about thirty years. Open war
was declared against all illegal distillers; yet the temptation to
illegal distilling continually increased, in proportion to the heavy
duties laid upon the fair trader. It came at length to a trial of
skill between revenue officers and distillers, which could cheat, or
which could detect, the fastest. The distiller had the strongest
interest in the business, and he usually came off victorious.
_Coursing officers_, and _watching officers_ (once ten _watching
officers_ were set upon one distiller) and _surveyors_ and
_supervisors_, multiplied without end: the land in their fiscal maps
was portioned out into _divisions_ and _districts_, and each gauger
had the charge of all the distillers in his division: the watching
officer went first, and the coursing offic