Page:On the Principles of Criminal Law.djvu/14

Rh it;—man, feeling in himself a power which can set at nought bodily influences, defies pain, and counts himself ennobled by having borne it without flinching. This one fact sufficiently shows that criminal legislation is not the easy task which many suppose it to be. The greatest revolutions the world has ever seen, have been brought about by men who encountered, without hesitation, the utmost rigor of severe laws, not hoping an escape for themselves, but satisfied that their tortures and death were sowing the dragon's teeth from which armed men would spring to sweep away the power under whose influence they had suffered. The legislator must learn to know and to calculate this interior force, ere he can guess what will be the effect of his laws.

I go farther:—the mechanician acknowledges laws impressed on matter which it has received from a mightier Power than his own; and he does not attempt to contravene them:—he calculates rather on their unvarying force, and his results correspond to his expectations. Are we then to suppose that inert matter has laws, and that intellect has none?—or are we to imagine that the material world is regulated by a Power far beyond our own, and that the moral world is left to chance? This would be poor logic. On the contrary, as the mechanician cannot proceed without ascertaining the material laws of the Creator, so the legislator, ere he can give force to his regulations, must ascertain His moral laws. All creation must lead to some object, and if the social be at variance with the moral law, the irresistible tendencies of nature will sweep it away. The legislator, therefore, must be not only acquainted with the powers and impulses of the beings for whom he legislates, but he must also endeavour to penetrate the yet deeper arcana of the universe, and arrive at the animus, as it were, of the Creator: for so sure as there is a Creator, so sure also is it that there is some object in creation: and this is no barren abstract doctrine of schoolmen and divines, but a great fact which must enter into all our calculations as a principal element, and which will either strengthen or nullify our code, according as it is in accordance with, or contradiction to, this object.