Page:Works of the Late Doctor Benjamin Franklin (1793).djvu/257

247 wealth and grew powerful, they enacted others more ſevere, and would protect their property at the expence of humanity. This was abuſing their power, and commencing a tyranny. If a ſavage, before he entered into ſociety, had been told—"Your neighbour, by this means, may become owner of an hundred deer; but if your brother, or your ſon, or yourſelf, having no deer of your own, and being hungry, ſhould kill one, an infamous death muſt be the conſequence:" he would probably have preferred his liberty, and his common right of killing any deer, to all the advantages of ſociety that might be propoſed to him.

That it is better a hundred guilty perſons ſhould eſcape, than that one innocent perſon ſhould ſuffer, is a maxim that has been long and generally approved; never, that I know of, controverted. Even the ſanguinary author of the Thoughts agrees to it, adding well, " that the very thought of injured innocence, and much more that of ſuffering innocence, muſt awaken all our tendereſt and moſt compaſſionate feelings, and at the ſame time raiſe our higheſt indignation againſt the inſtruments of it. But," he adds, "there is no danger of either, from a ſtrict adherence to the laws."—Really!—Is it then impoſſible to make an unjuſt law? and if the law itſelf be unjuſt, may it not be the very "inſtrument" which ought "to raiſe the author's, and every body's higheſt indignation?" I ſee, in the laſt newſpapers from London, that a woman is capitally convicted at the Old Bailey, for privately ſtealing out of a ſhop ſome gauze, value fourteen ſhillings and three-pence: Is there any proportion between the injury done by a theft, value fourteen ſhillings and three-pence, and the puniſhment of a human creature, by death, on a gibbet?