De l’action des lois de la morale, et des obstacles que cette action rencontre quelquefois dans cell

CHAP. 21: > Of the action of the laws of morality, and of the obstacles that this action sometimes encounters in that of governments, in public institutions, or in popular errors.

We have seen that there exist in man two sorts of habits; some that are favorable to the human race; others that are contrary to it. We have also seen that the action of public authority can be applied to seconding a certain number of the former, as to seconding a certain number of the latter. Finally, we have seen that there are actions useful to the human race that public authority cannot demand, and baneful actions that it cannot repress, without producing more evil than good. These latter actions are found outside the authority of governments, and remain in the domain of morality.

The love of labor, for example, is one of the most useful inclinations for the human race; it is one of the principal causes of our progress. The love of idleness is, on the contrary, an essentially baneful inclination; if the latter prevailed over the former, the most flourishing nations would rapidly fall into decadence. A government cannot, however, exercise any direct action on citizens to oblige them to work: if it wished to constrain them by penalties, it would be obliged to treat them as slaves; if it wished to determine them by rewards, it could give only what it had already taken; the discouragement it would produce on one side would be greater than the encouragement it would give on the other; it would, moreover, be impossible for it to have an exact measure of assessment, either for rewards or for punishments.

If the evil that results from a baneful action were immediately felt by its author, and if it were concentrated entirely upon him, one would have little need to concern oneself with it; it would be immediately repelled by the need that each feels to watch over his own preservation; never has a government needed to make laws to prevent men from letting themselves die of hunger or from getting too close to the fire. It would be equally useless to concern oneself with actions productive of good, if the effect immediately followed the cause, and if this effect were concentrated entirely on the author of the action; it has been no more necessary to make laws to oblige men to make use of agreeable and healthy foods, than it has been necessary to make them to prevent them from gouging out their eyes.

But all the bad effects of a baneful action or habit are not its immediate consequences, and do not fall exclusively on the individual who has committed this action or contracted this habit. We have seen, on the contrary, that the actions to which one gives the name of vicious are, in general, followed by an immediate pleasure for him who indulges in them, and that the evil is distant or spreads to other persons than him. Likewise, all the good effects of a useful action or habit do not arrive at the very instant this action is executed, and are not felt solely by him who is its author. The useful results of the actions or habits to which one gives the name of virtuous are, on the contrary, either distant, or experienced by others than by those who have these habits.

Suppose, for example, that a man possessing a more or less considerable capital employed in an industrial enterprise consumes it in foolish expenses or in vain prodigalities; upon whom will the baneful consequences of these vices fall? They will fall first upon him. Besides the evils that will be the immediate consequence of his bad habits, and which will vary according to the vices he has contracted, he will experience all the evils that are consequences of misery when it is merited: the impossibility of satisfying his needs, contempt, abandonment. They will fall, in the second place, upon his wife, upon his children, upon the diverse members of his family; and these will be in part of the same nature as those he will experience himself. They will fall, in the third place, upon the diverse classes of the population who found, in the dissipated capital, the means to exercise their industry, and consequently means of existence. The burning of a manufacturer's workshops throws into misery the workers who were employed there, and exposes their wives, their children, to dying of hunger; if they find employment elsewhere, it is only by bringing to the market a new quantity of labor and by driving down wages. The sufferings gain in extent what they lose in intensity: the same number of persons must live on a smaller quantity of products. Now, a foolish consumption destroys a productive capital as infallibly as a fire. Finally, the baneful consequences that will result from a bad habit will be felt, in this case, by all the persons who found, in the products of the same capital, the means to exchange their own products and to satisfy their needs. A productive capital annihilated is an outlet closed for almost all classes of producers. Thus, the baneful consequences of an individual's vices may be felt by thousands of persons, while the pleasures will have been experienced only by him or by a small number of his friends.

The good effects of a virtuous habit spread over the members of society in exactly the same way as the bad effects of a vicious habit. It is clear, for example, that he who, by his labors and his savings, succeeds in forming a capital that he devotes to production, produces effects diametrically opposed to those I have observed in the preceding case. He first experiences privations and fatigues himself; but the goods are then felt by him, by the diverse members of his family, by the diverse classes of society to which he furnishes the means to exercise their industry, and by the individuals to whom he delivers his products, in exchange for those he receives from them.

We would find the same results if we were to analyze any virtuous or vicious habit whatsoever, even those whose effects seem most confined to the persons by whom these habits have been contracted. Let a man, for example, consecrate half of his life to the study of the laws of his country, and become a skilled jurisconsult or a good magistrate, it is evident that he can be useful to himself and to his family only in proportion to the utility he will be to others. He may enjoy great consideration, and sometimes even acquire a considerable fortune; but he will acquire them only by an exchange of services; by becoming the counsel or the guide of those who lack the knowledge to direct their affairs; by administering justice with impartiality and promptness, and thus inspiring security in a more or less considerable portion of the members of society.

If, instead of supposing a man who, by his labors and his integrity, has succeeded in making himself useful to himself, to the members of his family, and to a more or less considerable number of his fellow citizens, we suppose a man who, after having acquired extensive knowledge, contracts vicious habits, we will arrive at an opposite result. A physician, for example, who contracted the habit of intemperance or some other vice that would make him lose public confidence, would not only harm himself and the members of his family; he would also harm all the persons who needed his services, and even all those who were interested in these persons. A father was persuaded that a certain physician would have cured his son of a certain illness; but this physician, by a vicious habit he has contracted, has become incapable. One refrains from calling him, or, if he is called, he kills the patient. The baneful consequences of the vice do not stop at the individual who dies; they fall upon his relatives, upon his friends, upon all those who were interested in his fate, and even upon all those who may fear finding themselves in a similar case.

All vices, whatever their nature, produce for the persons who indulge in them a mixture of pleasures and pains, although the sum of the pains is greater than that of the pleasures; but they produce at the same time, for a more or less large number of persons, a considerable quantity of evils that are compensated by no kind of enjoyments. A daughter who abandons her parents to follow an individual who has seduced her may find in some fleeting pleasures a compensation for the miseries to which she exposes herself; but the shame and the sorrow experienced by her father, her mother, her sisters and her brothers, and the fears that such an event spreads among families, are evils without any mixture of goods.

All virtuous habits likewise produce, for those who have contracted them, a mixture of goods and evils; but they produce at the same time, for other persons, a certain quantity of goods that no mixture of evil alters. A woman who consecrates the greater part of her life to the care of her household and to the education of her children submits to pains that are much more than compensated for by the enjoyments that are their consequence; but the consequences that result from her conduct for her husband, for her children, for the diverse members of her family, and for the persons to whom her conduct serves as an example, are goods that they enjoy without paying for them by any pain or any sacrifice.

The conduct of each individual, whether good or bad, therefore influences for good or for ill the fate of a multitude of other individuals. We have seen, however, that the action of public authority cannot be usefully employed to repress all the baneful inclinations that exist in men, or to make their useful inclinations always dominant. There remains, therefore, to repress vicious habits or to fortify virtuous habits, only the forces that are inherent in the very nature of man, and that are consequences of his organization. But in what do these forces consist? What are the means that can make them triumphant, or that tend to paralyze them? This is one of the most important questions of legislation and morality: one will see, in the remainder of this work, to what baneful consequences peoples have been led who have not perceived it, or who have resolved it badly.

A vice produces evils for a great number of persons, as we have seen previously; but the most considerable part of these evils falls naturally upon the individual who is afflicted with this vice; this is the repressive penalty attached to it by the author of our nature. A virtue produces good for a more or less considerable number of persons; but the most considerable part of these goods is, in general, devolved upon him to whom this virtue belongs, or upon the persons in whom he is most interested; this is the reward by means of which virtuous actions are produced. Thus, we are guaranteed from the baneful consequences of the vices of others, not by the action of public authority, but by the punishments that nature herself takes care to inflict on vicious people. An individual cannot harm us by means of a vicious habit without harming himself even more; that is our sole guarantee. The advantages that result for us from the good habits of others are not guaranteed to us by the force of the government either; they are guaranteed only by the goods that result from these habits for those who have contracted them, and for the persons they cherish; in such a case, the good one does to others is either the cause or the effect of that which one does to oneself.

The pains that a vice produces for the individual who indulges in it, and which we can liken to the punishment that tribunals inflict on criminals to diminish the number of crimes, are of diverse kinds and vary like the vices of which they are consequences; but they always affect the individual, either in his physical organs, or in his intellectual faculties, or in his moral affections. Often they affect him in all these parts: sometimes they affect him in only some of them. If a vice produces misery, like the passion for gambling, intemperance, prodigality, and sometimes even laziness, it is common enough that the individual who is afflicted with it is affected by the pains that are its consequence in all parts of his being; that he suffers physical pains, from the impossibility of satisfying his needs or from the diseases he has contracted; that he suffers moral pains, from the spectacle of the evils he has brought upon his family, from the decadence into which he sees it fall, and from the contempt or hatred of which he has become the object; finally, that he is even affected in his intellectual faculties, by the decline of his intelligence, or by the impossibility of cultivating it. There are vices that produce, for the individuals who indulge in them, no immediate physical evil, such as ambition, pride, perfidy, vengeance, cruelty, and some others. The pains that result from these vices, for those who have contracted them, are all moral; if they produce physical ones, as often happens, it is never in an immediate manner: physical evils, in such a case, are engendered only by moral pains.

We can make, on virtuous habits, the same observations that we have just made on vicious habits. There are several whose good effects affect the persons who have contracted them in their physical organs, in their moral affections, and in their intellectual faculties. Of this number are those that multiply or preserve for men the means of existence: such as labor, economy, the love of order, temperance. There are others that directly produce for those who possess them only moral enjoyments: such are benevolence, generosity, sincerity, and some others.Since the physical, moral, and intellectual pains that a vice produces for the individual who gives himself over to it are the only guarantee we have against the existence of that vice; and since the physical, moral, or intellectual pleasures that a virtuous habit produces for the person who has contracted it are likewise the only guarantee we have of the existence and duration of habits of this kind, what is the surest means, either of diminishing the number of vicious actions, or of multiplying the number of virtuous actions? This means is the same as that which the governments of all civilized peoples put into use, either to multiply the number of good actions, or to diminish the number of offenses or crimes. The only difference is on a single point: the pains and rewards by means of which governments tend to repress or to provoke certain actions are fixed by them; whereas the pains and rewards that tend to proscribe vicious habits or to multiply virtuous habits are fixed by the author of our nature himself, or by the peoples themselves.

These pains and rewards can be effective only insofar as they unite the conditions required for the efficacy of the rewards and pains distributed by the authority of governments. They must be public, so that no one acts or abstains from acting out of ignorance; they must be certain, so that no one gives himself over to a vice in the hope of avoiding its punishment, or abstains from a virtuous action in the fear of not reaping its fruits; finally, they must be proportioned to the gravity of the vice or to the greatness of the virtue, so that one is not carried away by the pleasures that accompany a vicious habit, and that one is not held back by the pains or by the sacrifices that a good action requires.

The pains that vice produces for him who gives himself over to it, and the advantages that result from a virtuous conduct for him who follows it, can be made public in two ways. They can be so, first, by the teaching of morality, which exposes the good or bad consequences of all human actions; this is, if I may speak thus, the promulgation of the law. They can be so, in the second place, by the exposition of the facts that occur daily in society; this is the execution of the law. When a tribunal has inflicted a penalty on an individual guilty of a bad action, the sentence is executed in broad daylight and in the face of the public; one seeks to guarantee society from new crimes by restraining through the fear of torments those who would be tempted to commit them. To give the laws of morality the same efficacy, it would be necessary, if it were possible, for him who has broken them to suffer the punishment in the eyes of all those who might have the temptation to follow his example. When a government wishes to multiply a certain kind of action, it rewards them publicly; it wants everyone to perceive, as clearly as possible, the connection that exists between the reward and the action by means of which it was obtained. It is in the same way that men would need to see the connection that exists between virtuous habits and the consequences that follow from them for the individuals who practice them: this is an essential part of the publicity that laws, those of morality as well as others, must have.

The certainty of pains is a condition no less necessary to their efficacy than publicity itself. What multiplies the number of offenses is not the insufficiency or the weakness of the pains, it is the uncertainty of their application. In all countries, men fear prison, irons, and death almost equally; but, in all countries, the same certainty does not reign over the application of these pains. The most determined evildoer would not commit a theft in the presence of witnesses, and under the hand of the public force; to become guilty, he needs to believe either that he will not be discovered, or that he cannot be convicted, or that he will have some means of escape, or that his pardon will be granted. Individuals who offend the laws of morality make exactly the same calculations; they break them only because the punishments attached to the infraction seem to them to lack certainty. The uncertainty of rewards produces an analogous effect with regard to virtuous habits: one does not take a pain whose fruit one is not sure of reaping, or of seeing it reaped by the persons in whom one is interested.

The proportion that must exist between the pains and the gravity of the vices that produce them, or between the rewards and the greatness of the virtues of which they are the result, has been fixed by nature itself; but this proportion is often altered by the ignorance and by the false calculations of governments or of peoples. The pains that a vice produces for him who is afflicted with it, and the advantages that result from a good habit for him who practices it, can be effective only insofar as the former exceed the pleasures for which one exposes oneself to them, and as the latter exceed the sacrifices at the price of which one buys them. But, as the distant effects of an action always have more uncertainty than those that accompany or follow it immediately, the pains that nature has destined to repress vice, and the rewards by means of which it produces virtue, can be effective only insofar as they gain in duration and intensity what they may lack in certainty.

Nature has left peoples only the choice of evils: if they wish to repress those that result from offenses or crimes, they must let those that constitute repression act; they must establish tribunals, procedures, prisons, gallows; they must give to a small number of men the power to pursue, arrest, imprison, even kill the individuals they believe to be guilty; from this results much suffering, not only for the criminals who are pursued and convicted, for their relatives and for their friends; but also for those who are pursued or condemned though innocent, and for those who fear being so. If ever a people wished to deliver itself from all evils of this kind, it would have no other means than to submit to all the infinitely more serious evils that are the natural consequence of unbridled brigandage.

Peoples are in exactly the same position with regard to vicious habits; they must choose between two kinds of evils; they must leave to the physical, moral, or intellectual pains that nature has destined for the repression of vice, and which she makes fall upon the vicious individual, the publicity, certainty, duration, and energy that are proper to these diverse kinds of pains, or they must suffer the multiplication of the evils that vice produces for the very persons who are innocent of it: if they do not want the evil of repression, they must submit to the evil of impunity. A vicious habit produces, for him who has contracted it, pleasures and pains; it produces, for a multitude of other persons, pains without any mixture of pleasures. Suppress the pains it engenders for the vicious individual, and only pleasures will remain for him; this individual will consequently no longer have any check, and the other persons to whom his vices are baneful will find themselves without any guarantee. They will find themselves, with regard to him, in a still more disadvantageous position than would the members of society toward evildoers whom some authority might shelter from prosecution and judicial penalties; for it is not impossible to repel the attacks of an evildoer, but one has no means of preventing an individual from giving himself over to vice.

A vice naturally produces for him who has contracted it diverse physical pains, such as those that result from misery; it produces diverse kinds of diseases; it produces, moreover, moral pains, contempt, abandonment, antipathy, the sorrow of seeing one’s line extinguished or decline; it produces intellectual incapacity and the evils that accompany it. Now, any act by which an individual, a society, or a government diminishes the publicity, intensity, duration, or certainty of any of these pains, is an attack on good customs. Such an act has the effect of weakening the only guarantee that each of us possesses against the vices of others; it acts, with regard to vicious habits, as would act, with regard to the actions that authority represses, the existence of a society that, out of humanity, made it a duty to go and break down the doors of prisons. A few examples will make this truth more perceptible.

There is no kind of vice more baneful for a woman, and more humiliating for her family, than that which leads her to prostitution. This vice produces for the woman who is afflicted with it a certain number of pleasures; but it also produces a great number of pains, the extinction of all pure moral affection, the certainty of contempt and abandonment, expulsion from all respectable society, the difficulty and almost the impossibility of raising her children, the privation of the help and support of their father, the misery and sufferings inseparable from such a state, the contempt and ill-treatment of the only individuals with whom she can have any relations, baneful diseases that can become mortal, the prospect of seeing her children in the lowest echelon of the social order, and an old age, supposing one reaches it, ended in the most frightful misery, and employed in doing the vilest jobs.

Such is the lot of misery attached to this kind of vice for the person who gives herself over to it; a lot very considerable in itself, but which is no greater than is needed for the repression of the vice, if one considers the power of seduction, the facility with which one at first procures means of existence, the absence of every kind of labor and even of all constraint, the distance at which the pains present themselves, and consequently the uncertainty that seems attached to them.

The lot of pains that fall upon the old parents is less considerable; but also these are evils that arrive immediately, and with which no kind of good is mixed: shame, abandonment, deceived hopes; a part of these evils spreads to the brothers, the sisters, and to other members of the family; the evil can even spread to foreign families, by the influence or merely by the fear of the example. I do not speak of the diverse kinds of evils that the individual in question can cause directly, through her liaisons; the persons she can draw into the same path by her counsels or by her seductions.

Let us suppose now that a people proposes to repress, within itself, the vice of prostitution, and that it is convinced of the impossibility of usefully employing penal laws; what are the means that must naturally present themselves to its mind? There are only two: one is to diminish, or even to destroy, if it were possible, the pleasures attached to the vice; the other, to give to the pains that are its natural consequence for the vicious individual, the full degree of publicity, proximity, certainty, and duration of which they are susceptible. The first means not being practicable, only the second remains; but how to put it into use? By not disturbing the order of nature; by abandoning vicious persons to themselves, and by showing others what has become of them.

But if, all at once, there forms, in the bosom of the population, a society that has for its object to diminish the number of evils that this vice engenders for those who are afflicted with it or for their posterity, and which establishes at its expense houses where it promises to receive, free of charge, all women who wish to deliver their children there, it, by that very fact, makes the career of vice easier; it diminishes its pains, not for the individuals who are innocent; those remain the same; it diminishes them only for the vicious persons, without in any way diminishing the attractions that the vice has for them.

If another society then presents itself which takes charge of receiving, feeding, and maintaining at its expense all children born out of wedlock, whose mothers might be burdened by them, and whose fathers would not want to take care of them, the career of vice will be easier still. The pains that this vice produces will remain the same for all persons to whom it is foreign; the pleasures will also remain the same for the vicious persons; but the evils will decrease for them in an immense proportion. The cares, the burdens, and sometimes the diseases inseparable from maternity, so painful even in families that do not lack means of existence, will be taken from her; she will have no need to suspend the course of her bad habits. I do not speak of the fate of the children; we will see elsewhere how small is the good one obtains in this regard, in comparison with the evils at the price of which one buys it.

If a third society presents itself which establishes a house to receive and treat at its expense those of these persons who, in giving themselves over to their vicious habits, have contracted dangerous diseases, the pain of the vice is weakened still more, not for the persons who suffer from it without being afflicted with it, but for the person who alone has experienced its pleasures; the pleasures that lead toward vice retain all their power; the only pains that can repress it lose some of theirs.

Finally, if a fourth society is formed which has for its goal to shelter the persons who have thus engaged in a vicious career from the baneful consequences that contempt and abandonment bring in their wake; which offers an asylum to prostitutes under the name of repentant women; which furnishes them with food and clothing when they take a disgust to their infamous trade; which seeks to restore to them the esteem they have lost and to have them re-enter the society from which they have been excluded, the baneful consequences of the vice remain always the same for the persons who are innocent; but they seem to vanish for those who are guilty; and as the weakening of the pains produces no diminution in the pleasures, there is almost no reason left why, in certain classes, vice should not multiply to infinity [119].

There was established, in a town in England, toward the end of the year 1824, a society of about thirty or forty individuals, with a view to bearing, in common, the expenses that each of the members would incur for the maintenance of the bastard children of whom he might be declared the father. This society, having its president, its treasurer, its secretary, was denounced to public opinion by the newspapers, as having for its evident object the encouragement of vice; it was threatened with the publication of the name of each of the members of whom it was composed, if it did not dissolve [120].

It is impossible not to recognize, in effect, that such a society is an encouragement for vice. But how so? In that it has the effect of reducing into small fractions one of the pains that the law concentrates on the single individual who is guilty. If the declaration of paternity, for example, is followed by the obligation to pay annually a sum of three hundred francs, the association, supposing it to be composed of only thirty persons, reduces this sum, for the guilty individual, to a sum of ten francs. The fear of being obliged to pay a sum of three hundred francs every year could have put a check on his passions; the fear of paying ten francs will be without influence on him. It is true that, if only the thirtieth part of the penalty he has incurred falls on him, he will have to bear the thirtieth part of the penalty incurred by each of his associates. If he has to pay ten francs on his own account, he will have to pay two hundred and ninety francs on account of others; but this latter part of the penalty, though the most considerable, will be without influence on his conduct, since it will not be a consequence of it.This society, evidently immoral, since it reduces to a thirtieth, for the guilty individual, one of the principal pains that tend to repress his vices, and since it makes the remaining twenty-nine thirtieths fall upon other individuals, is nevertheless less immoral in its effects than the associations of which I have previously spoken, and which exist, under various names, in all the great cities of Europe, and particularly in England. Let us suppose, in effect, that the members of this society, after having agreed that they would bear in common the penalties incurred by them individually, had added that they would likewise provide in common, to the women seduced by any one of them, the means to give birth in a comfortable house; would not their association have been a new encouragement to vice? Would this encouragement not have become greater still, if they had added that they would have treated at their expense, and in houses of their own, all the diseases that were the product of vice; that they would deliver the mothers from all the cares of maternity, and that they would bear the costs in common? Would seduction not have become more powerful, if they had added that an asylum would be opened at their expense for women who, after having led a licentious life with them, wished to re-enter the bosom of society, and that no means would be neglected to procure them an honorable existence?

But what would not have been said if, after having formed such an association, it had been announced publicly and with ostentation; if subscribers had been solicited to take part in it; if one had addressed oneself to benevolent and charitable souls; if vast establishments had been opened to put such magnificent projects into execution, and if all women of all classes, of all conditions, had been called to read, on the frontispiece, the encouragements that had been given to them? The members of such an association would have certainly been accused of being the corrupters of public morality, and condemned by any tribunal zealous to have good morals respected. What, however, are the differences that would exist between a society such as I suppose it, and those that exist in most of the cities of Europe? A single one: in the case I suppose, the associates give encouragement only to their own vices and to the vices of the persons who consent to become their accomplices and to profit from their benevolent institutions; the number of women who can be seduced is necessarily limited by the number of men who can seduce them; but, in the establishments that actually exist, the call made to vice is universal for both sexes. It is true that these establishments were made with good intentions; but what influence can the intention of he who founded it have on a vicious institution?

If the institutions, by means of which one hopes to diminish, for vicious persons, the pains that fall solely upon them, and which are the only means of repression we know, produced the effects one hopes for from them, they would be essentially bad, since they would multiply vices by encouraging them, and since of all the evils that would be their consequences, the only part that would be softened would be that which would fall upon the vicious persons. But, what is remarkable, is that they produce the first of these two effects, without producing the second. They have but one very evident result; that is to make the repressive penalties of vices uncertain, without taking almost anything away from their reality. They act in the same sense as lotteries: they give hopes to all those who wish to run some risk; but, for one individual whom they save from complete ruin, they cause the loss of a multitude.

It has been observed that the number of public women who exist in London greatly exceeds the number of those who exist in Paris, even keeping all proportion of population. Paris is, however, the abode of a multitude of idle foreigners; the number of military men who are there, and particularly of officers, is very considerable; all the great schools are established there; finally, in no part of Europe does one find united, in so narrow a space, such a considerable number of young men or bachelors; whereas in London one sees only a small number of foreigners whom their business attracts there; the small number of military men who are there are mostly married, even the common soldiers; there exists no university there; parents keep their children away from it as much as they can; and with the exception of the theaters, there is almost no public gathering for the two sexes. The capital of France nevertheless contains a rather considerable number of institutions proper to encourage vice; but it possesses many fewer than the capital of England, and the evils that vice engenders for those who are infected with it inspire in the English much more pity than in the French. In France, a public woman and a lost woman are two perfectly synonymous expressions: thus, their number is not very great, comparatively to what exists in other countries. In England, there are no lost women; and that is what causes there to be an immense multitude of public women [121].

There are several kinds of vices whose principal effect is to produce misery for the individual who has contracted them; an institution that has for its object to shelter from misery all sorts of persons, without distinction of the causes that produced it, therefore has for its result to encourage all the vices that lead to poverty. The tribunals cannot condemn to a fine individuals who are guilty of laziness, intemperance, improvidence, or other vices of this kind; but nature, which has made a law for man of labor, temperance, moderation, foresight, has taken it upon herself to inflict on the guilty the punishments they incur. To render these punishments vain by giving a right to aid to those who have incurred them, is, as in the preceding cases, to leave to vice all the attractions it has; it is, moreover, to let act the evils it produces for the individuals to whom it is foreign, and to weaken or destroy the only pains that can repress it. The laws that establish in England a tax in favor of all the poor indiscriminately; those that, in some parts of Switzerland, place at the charge of the parishes or communes all indigent inhabitants, whatever the cause of their indigence; finally, that which, in the United States, establishes similar dispositions, therefore have the effect of multiplying a great number of vices [122].

Not all vices produce for the individuals who are afflicted with them the same quantity or the same kind of pains: there are several, as I have already observed, that produce only moral pains, such as contempt, aversion, exclusion from certain societies, and other analogous ones. These pains sometimes bring in their wake very grave physical pains; but when the former are paralyzed, the latter are no longer to be feared.

Here, several interesting questions present themselves: what are the vices that produce for the individuals who are afflicted with them only moral pains? What are the consequences of these vices for individuals other than those who are afflicted with them? What are the acts of governments, of private associations, or of peoples that diminish, for vicious individuals, the publicity, intensity, duration, and certainty of the moral pains proper to repress these vices? What are, for the public, the effects of this weakening of pains? The complete solution of all these questions would require a very extensive work: to leave nothing unsaid, it would be necessary to write a treatise on morality and to present at the same time the history of governments. I will confine myself to clarifying them with a few explanations.

Several times, attempts have been made to produce or to repress, by the force of public authority, actions or habits that can be produced or repressed only by the force of morality: I have shown why these attempts have always succeeded badly. But there are many actions that have remained under the exclusive empire of morality, and that ought to have been repressed by the force of public authority.

There have been princes who have taken enough interest in their subjects to want to regulate their private expenses and to repress, by penal laws, the vice of dissipation or prodigality. None has yet been found who imagined that it was necessary to repress, by the same means, the avidity, baseness, or pride of his courtiers, the peculations or corruptions of his ministers, the ineptitude of men in office, the attacks made by the agents of his government on the well-being of individuals or of nations. In all the States of Europe, without excepting England, all these facts have remained in the domain of morality; I could even say in the entire world, if I excepted the United States of America, whose institutions do not suffer vices of this kind.

Baseness, cupidity, pride, ambition, perfidy, vengeance, cruelty, rapacity, are not vices that, in our supposedly civilized countries, produce physical evils for the individuals who are afflicted with them, when these individuals are in the high ranks of society. The same vices, in the lower ranks, can lead to theft, outrage, assassination, and bring upon the individuals in whom they are found very grave physical pains, whether they are inflicted on them at the moment of the action by the persons they offend, or whether they are inflicted on them by virtue of a legal condemnation; by producing contempt and aversion, these vices often produce misery, which is itself very fertile in pains of all kinds. When they are found in the elevated ranks, they rarely lead the individuals who have contracted them before the tribunals; it is more common for them to be a source of riches, and consequently of physical enjoyments. If Louvois had been born in the ranks from which Cartouche emerged, he would have had the houses of some magistrates burned by his gang; he would have perished at the stake or on the wheel, and Bossuet would not have delivered his funeral oration. If Cartouche had been born in the ranks from which Louvois emerged, he would, no doubt, have had the Palatinate pillaged, but it is probable that he would not have had it burned. He would have enjoyed in peace the product of his depredations; and would have carried away, in dying, the regrets of respectable people and the blessings of the Church.

There are, therefore, vicious actions, and, if you will, crimes that produce for their authors no physical pain; they have, on the contrary, the effect of producing many pleasures of the same kind; and since no legal penalty represses them, they can be repressed only by moral pains: by the contempt, by the aversion, by the hatred they inspire in the public, against those who are their authors, and against those who profit from them. Pains of this kind produce another that is the most powerful; it is the absence of all security, and the certainty of being abandoned or overwhelmed in reversals. A man whose vices or crimes have caused the misfortune of one or several nations, feels himself delivered, without defense, to the courtiers who surround him, if he is a king; or to the arbitrariness of the master he has served, if he is a subject. The courtiers of Nero deliver themselves, by death, from the fear he causes them; Nero, to deliver himself from the terrors that his enemies inspire in him, calls upon his own breast the dagger of his freedman.

The vices that are repressed by no physical penalty therefore produce for those who have contracted them and for those who are their instruments, a mixture of physical pleasures and moral pains; but they produce, for an immense multitude of persons, pains of all kinds, without any mixture of pleasure: they produce servitude, the absence of all security, misery, ignorance, persecutions, wars, massacres, and all the calamities that despotism drags in its wake.

The peoples having no other guarantees against these evils than the moral pains that vices produce for vicious individuals and for those who profit from their vices, what are the means by which one can increase or diminish the publicity, intensity, duration, and certainty of these pains?

The surest means of taking away the penalty’s publicity is to prevent any public opinion from being able to be formed, and to take from each all means of expressing his individual opinion: to subject to a prior and arbitrary censorship all writings destined to be published; to prevent any public assembly in which citizens could communicate their sentiments; to punish any person who would dare to call down aversion or contempt upon a man who, by his acts, had made himself odious or contemptible: sentiments that cannot be manifested are considered, by most men, as if they did not exist.

The same acts that attack the publicity of the penalty diminish its intensity; the contempt and aversion that remain buried in the depths of souls are a less severe moral punishment than the contempt and aversion that are manifested publicly. These acts also diminish its certainty and its duration: one doubts the existence of sentiments that nothing manifests, and time weakens or extinguishes those that one has no means of bringing to light. There is no government that, wishing to establish the reign of a certain number of vices, has not felt the need to weaken the repressive penalties of these same vices, and that has not sought to destroy the publicity of these penalties.

The surest means of diminishing their certainty is to attach esteem or contempt to conventional signs whose distribution the authority reserves for itself arbitrarily. A man performs an action useful to his country, he is given the agreed-upon sign, and the public honors the sign because of the merit of the person. Another commits some baseness, becomes the happy accomplice of some corruption or some treason, he is given the same sign; and as, in the first case, the public honored the sign because of the merit of the man, in the second, it honors the man because of the honor it has accorded to the sign. It is thus that one can make the homage that peoples accord to virtues serve to make uncertain the punishments that nature has destined for the repression of vices. This explains to us how there have been men who have rejected the supposed honors that were deigned to be granted to them. They did not want the esteem with which the public surrounded them to be able to be represented by a sign that, if need be, would serve to cover the vices of the most infamous individual. These signs sometimes consist in a nickname, sometimes in a piece of gold or silver, sometimes in an embroidery, in a piece of ribbon, or even in a garter. Sometimes also one considers fortune as the infallible sign of an individual's merit; then it is only a matter of having a share in the pillage of a people, to be esteemed by it. At other times, merit consists in the manifestation of an opinion; then each is esteemed in proportion to his talent for hypocrisy.

It is impossible to multiply vices without decreasing in the same proportion the number of virtues. Every time, therefore, that one diminishes the publicity, intensity, certainty, or duration of a penalty destined for the repression of a vicious habit, one weakens, by that very fact, the contrary habit. It happens sometimes, however, that instead of attacking virtuous habits indirectly, one attacks them in a direct manner, by diminishing the publicity, intensity, certainty, or duration of the advantages that are their natural consequence. If a man, for example, renders an important service to a nation, and is rewarded for it by particular honors or by riches, the act that will prevent the publicity of the reward, or that will ravish the fruit from him to whom it will have been granted, or that will threaten the authors with some penalty, will be an essentially immoral act. When a government succeeds in rendering sterile the devotion of men to the interests of their country or of humanity, one does not long find devoted citizens [123].

We can draw from what precedes three general consequences.

1. That there are malevolent actions that penal laws cannot reach, and beneficent actions that they cannot command.
2. That the former of these actions can be repressed only by the physical, moral, or intellectual pains they engender for those who are their authors; and that the latter can be produced only by means of the rewards that are their natural consequence.
3. That any act by means of which one diminishes the publicity, intensity, certainty, or duration of the penalty that vice produces for the vicious individual, is an immoral act, an act whose effect is to multiply vices; and that an act that has for its effect to diminish the publicity, intensity, certainty, or duration of the advantages that are the consequence of virtuous habits, is equally contrary to good morals, since its result is to diminish the number of good actions.In saying that there are sufferings which the interest of humanity forbids us to relieve, I will offend, I do not doubt, the sentiments of more than one reader. Do not religion and humanity command us to relieve all persons who suffer? Are not all men brothers? Must they not share the goods and evils they hold from their common author? Is it permissible for man to show himself inexorable and without pity toward any of his fellows?

I do not say that one must not relieve persons who suffer; I say only that the individual who, to diminish the suffering of one person, causes more serious sufferings to others, does not perform a good action. An imprudent man falls into the sea; if one can save him only by losing the crew, it is a sad necessity, but he must be left to perish. Religion commands us to help suffering persons, to console the afflicted; doubtless, but it also forbids us to produce sufferings and afflictions. A man suffers from hunger; religion commands that he be given food; but if this could be done only by starving a city, would religion command that he be helped?

One feels, doubtless, a painful sentiment at seeing suffering beings, and not giving them the aid one has at one's disposal; but when, with a view to repressing crimes, justice strikes the guilty, must one, out of humanity, rise up against it? Must one free the condemned from their penalties? Would one think that the laws established by governments for the repression of crimes are more just than those that nature herself has established for the repression of vices? Would the judgments of our tribunals seem to us more infallible than the very laws of our own nature? If the utility of the power to grant pardon could be called into question, even with our defective laws and our tribunals subject to prejudice and error, who will dare take it upon himself to grant someone pardon from the penalty destined for the repression of his vices? If the vice is constant, who will dare say that the penalty is misapplied or excessive? Does one think that any justice would exist on earth, if the faculty of exercising the power to grant pardon belonged indistinctly to all, and if each made use of it?

In all the States of Europe, the disposition of peoples to weaken, for vicious individuals, the repressive penalties of vice, is in direct proportion to the very need they have for repression. If a bad habit produces few enjoyments for him who has contracted it, and if it is at the same time productive of misery, physical diseases, and moral pains, peoples will be quite disposed to show themselves without pity: they will let the punishments that nature has reserved for the repression of vices of this kind act in all their rigor. But, if a vice that produces frightful calamities for the human race produces, for him who has contracted it, great riches, and consequently many physical pleasures, each will be disposed to grant pardon, to the vicious individual, from the moral pains that could have repressed him. One will dissimulate the contempt, the aversion one has for him; and if a man is found who has enough courage and probity to express his thought aloud, he will be accused of lacking politeness or savoir-vivre, perhaps even of being a coarse and ill-bred man.

After having smoothed the ways for prostitution, after having publicly promised women who wished to enter this career to relieve them of the expenses and cares of maternity, to treat them in their illnesses, to give them asylum in case of abandonment, to restore them, as much as possible, to public esteem, and even to assure them means of existence for the end of their days, it seems to have been believed that it was also necessary to establish a penitentiary for the prostitutes of governments. If, after having been the instrument of some treason or some baseness; after having, out of cupidity, vengeance, or only vanity, plunged entire populations into desolation; after having called proscription down upon a multitude of innocent families, and had the most estimable men of their country delivered to torment, some great culprit is cast off like a vile instrument by the individuals whose projects he has served, he has only to spout a few phrases, and to protest his good intentions, and immediately charitable and benevolent souls rush in to tend his wounds, to give him consolations, to restore him to public esteem.

Is it not then an error to say that nature herself has attached a penalty to each vice, in order to repress it? If there is a multitude of vices that are followed, for those who have contracted them, by no physical penalty, and if peoples themselves take care to render the moral penalties null, by hiding or stifling the contempt and hatred that great malefactors naturally inspire in them, what then is the punishment reserved for them?

In saying that every vice entails for him who is afflicted with it a more or less considerable sum of evils, I did not affirm that these evils always arrive; I have shown, on the contrary, that peoples had the means to weaken them, and I have shown at what price they could remedy them. Peoples find themselves, relative to vicious habits, in exactly the same position where they are relative to criminal actions: they must choose between the evils of repression and the evils of impunity. Ignorant or corrupt judges, they can absolve a tyrant and his satellites of their crimes or their baseness; but they will be punished themselves for their ignorance or their corruption; they will be punished by the very multiplication of tyrants and their satellites. They can leave in oblivion, and even persecute, the men who have devoted themselves to their defense; but they will be punished for their ingratitude or their iniquity, by the extinction of all generous sentiment, and by abandonment under the rod of their executioners. The crimes or vices of a few great culprits may remain unpunished or be so only imperfectly; but do the vices that produce impunity also remain without punishment? Would the torments that the strong have always reserved for cowards have any charms for those who experience them?

There is no vice, when it becomes general, that does not take some honorable name. As long as a man enjoys great power, one would not dare say what one thinks of his vices or his crimes; it would be to lack prudence, and to forget, moreover, what one owes to ranks and dignities. When he totters in his power, or has fallen from it, it would be cowardly to attack him. When he has ceased to live, he can no longer defend himself, and it would be a lack of generosity to attack men for whom defense is impossible; that cannot be suitable for brave and generous peoples.

One would say, to hear such language, that there are, on earth, no just judgments but those that are decided in single combat or on the fields of battle. But how do those who speak thus not also address it to justice? This wretch whom one exposes in a public square, disarmed, his arms bound, surrounded by an imposing military force, is he not also a weak and defenseless being? Why do you not demand, before a burning iron imprints upon him the brand of his infamy, that he be given his liberty, that he be allowed to arm himself with his dagger, and to call around him an armed band of accomplices? Would not a hand-to-hand combat between the malefactors and the magistrates charged with rendering justice be worthy of a brave, generous, loyal nation? Tacitus branded Sejanus and Tiberius with infamy, and Sejanus and Tiberius could no longer defend themselves. The brand of infamy that attaches to the name or the memory of great criminals is the only penalty that men who enjoy great power recognize. The closer this penalty is to the crime, and the more certainty and intensity it has, the more, consequently, it is effective. It is better that a tyrant and his satellites be branded with infamy during the course of their reign, than to be so only when they have fallen from power. But it is better still that they be so as soon as they have lost their power, than if they were so only after their death. In a word, whenever a certain kind of vice or crime can be repressed only by moral penalties, by contempt, aversion, abandonment, all acts, all maxims that tend to diminish the proximity, certainty, intensity, and duration of these penalties, tend, by that very fact, to the multiplication of these crimes. All acts or all maxims that tend, on the contrary, to increase the proximity, certainty, intensity, and duration of these same penalties, tend to the extirpation of the same crimes and the same vices.

It is not difficult to perceive the causes that determine the judgments of nations, relative to certain vices or certain crimes. The vicious or criminal actions that can be repressed only by moral penalties are, in general, those that belong to men invested with great power; but these men cannot be maleficent without having numerous accomplices, and without sharing with them the advantages that the vice or the crime brings them. When they fall, the latter remain standing, and have a double interest in the punishment not following the offense too closely. First, this punishment would fall partly on them; and second, it would ravish from them the hope they may have of serving some other great culprit.

“As the greatest torment of tyrants is fear,” says Montesquieu, “the greatest crime of which one can be guilty toward them, is to make them afraid.” What this illustrious writer has said of tyrants, we can say of all their accomplices. It results from this sentiment of fear, that almost all men who have been invested with great power have sought to distort the judgment of nations, on the vices and crimes that are particular to certain ranks. In all countries, it is the masters who have shaped the understanding of the slaves, and they have always shaped it in the interest of slavery and of the vices that are in turn its cause and its result. The last reforms a people thinks of are those of its prejudices and its ideas; even when the excess of its misery constrains it to shake off the yoke, it continues, for a long time, to render judgments such as the interest of its oppressors had dictated; and it is by yielding to a false pity that it prepares new calamities for itself.

Every man, in coming into the world, finds before him two careers: that of virtues and fine actions, and that of vices and crimes; it is necessary, as much as is possible, to cast upon the one and the other the most vivid light; but, after having illuminated them and having shown where each of them leads, there remains but one safeguard for nations: it is to place at the entrance of the latter this terrible inscription from Dante's hell:

PER ME SI VA NELLA CITTA DOLENTE : PER ME SI VA NELL’ ETERNO DOLORE : PER ME SI VA TRA LA PERDUTA GENTE. GIUSTIZIA MOSSE ‘L MIO ALTO FATTORE. ………………………………………………. LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH’ ENTRATE.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.