FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME II

PAGI

A Reunion at the House of Aspasia (Photogravure) Frontispiece Henry Ward Beecher (Portrait after His Statue,

Napoleon Receiving the Portrait of His Son (Photogravure) 553 Robert Browning (Portrait, Photogravure)

646

Lord George Noel Gordon Byron (Portrait, Photogravure) 800 The Death of Chatterton (Photogravure)

814

419

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."