Page:An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).djvu/285

 In Italy, where murderers, by flying to a sanctuary, are allowed more frequently to escape, the crime has never been held in the same detestation and has consequently been more frequent. No man, who is at all aware of the operation of moral motives, can doubt for a moment, that if every murder in Italy had been invariably punished, the use of the stiletto in transports of passion, would have been comparatively but little known.

That human laws, either do, or can, proportion the punishment accurately to the offence, no person will have the folly to assert. From the inscrutability of motives the thing is absolutely impossible: but this imperfection, though it may be called a species of injustice, is no valid argument against human laws. It is the lot of man, that he will