THE MARQUIS OF BECCARIA

(CESARE BONESANO MARCHESE DI BECCARIA)

(1735-1793)

T IS only necessary to read a few clauses of anything the Marquis of Beccaria has written, to feel the commanding power of his great intellect. The reader accustomed to strive with other writers for the privilege of wresting their meaning from their words is so strongly compelled by Beccaria, that, unless he deliberately make up his mind to dissent at the beginning, he will be forced from one irresistible conclusion to another. It is doubtful if Italy since the time of Cicero, has produced Beccaria's equal as a master of style and as a thinker in his own field of the philosophy of human action. His eminence in Italian literature is incontestible. He has a faculty of striking out his sentences, complete in thought and ready for separate currency, as if they came from the stamp of a mint, while at the same time each is a part of the sum of a broader thought, and a link in the chain of its demonstration. "It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them"; . . . «The majority of laws are nothing but privileges, or a tribute paid by all to the convenience of some few"; . . "Salutary is the fear of the law, but fatal and fertile in crime is the fear of one man by another"; "Would you prevent crimes-then see that enlightenment accompanies liberty"; "The evils that flow from knowledge are in inverse ratio to its diffusion"; "the great clash [is] between the errors which are serviceable to a few men of power and the truths which are serviceable to the weak and the many"-in such sentences as these which crowd each other in his pages, we must feel, even when we cannot comprehend, the secret of the power which enabled him so to sway the mind of civilization that within fifty years after the publication of his great work, "Dei Delitti e Delle Pene» (On Crimes and Punishments), it had influenced for the better the whole course of government in every Caucasian nation of the world, justifying fully in results the calm confidence with which Beccaria had written: "The voice of the philosopher is feeble against the noise and cries of so many followers of blind custom, but the few wise men scattered over the earth will respond from their inmost hearts."

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Beccaria's relations to Montesquieu are evident. He seems to have regarded himself as Montesquieu's pupil, but his intellectual habits are in all things those of the master,-the man of universal sympathy using a strong intellect as a mode of expression for a soul inspired by the sacred desire of decreasing the suffering of mankind.

He was born at Milan in 1735, and educated in the Jesuit College at Parma. His first work as an essayist was done on a small paper called Il Caffè, modeled on the Spectator, so that the style and mind of Addison may fairly be assumed as greatly influential in determining his intellectual habits. His work on "Crimes and Punishments," published in 1764, passed through six editions at once and was soon translated into the principal languages of Europe. One of the most radical thinkers of modern times, Beccaria was nevertheless so conservative in his attitude towards existing institutions, and so distrustful of all revolutionary changes, that he was chosen to assist in reforming the Italian Judicial Code, and appointed to a chair of Public Law and Economy which had been founded expressly for him in the Palatine College of Milan. He died in 1793.

IT

THE PREVENTION OF CRIMES

T IS better to prevent crimes than to punish them. This is the chief aim of every good system of legislation, which is the art of leading men to the greatest possible happiness or to the least possible misery, according to calculation of all the goods and evils of life. But the means hitherto employed for this end are for the most part false and contrary to the end proposed. It is impossible to reduce the turbulent activity of men to a geometrical harmony without irregularity or confusion. As the constant and most simple laws of nature do not prevent aberrations in the movements of the planets, so, in the infinite and contradictory attractions of pleasure and pain, disturbances and disorder cannot be prevented by human laws. Yet this is the chimera that narrow-minded men pursue, when they have power in their hands. To prohibit a number of indifferent acts is not to prevent the crimes that may arise from them, but it is to create new ones from them; it is to give capricious definitions of virtue and vice which are proclaimed as eternal and immutable in their nature. To what should we be reduced if everything had to be forbidden us which might tempt us to a crime? It would be necessary to deprive a man of the use