those, whether denominated heretics, misbelievers, infidels, or atheists, who have refused to acknowledge the reality of their divine mission and appointment, and humbly to submit, in consequence, to their despotic authority. If within the last century, religious persecution throughout Christendom has assumed a less destructive character, that has been chiefly owing to the circumstance that with the declining influence of the mystical philosophy and the increase of religious skepticism, civil governments have refused to act any longer as the agents of priestly persecution. All that can be done without the help of the civil magistrate, still is done. The unhappy rebel against mystic despotism, is placed under a social interdict, not wholly dissimilar to that interdict of fire and water among the Romans, which, evading the name and the form of capital punishment, was more terrible and not less effectual.

That school of Christian mystics, which we have above described as having combined the mystical and disinterested theories of morals, and gradually etherealized God into a personification of Humanity, are led by that view to repudiate religious persecution; and hence, among that school of mystics there are some sincere friends of the entire toleration of opinions; and it is partly owing to the increased diffusion of their ideas, that religious persecutions have gradually acquired a more mitigated character.

24. Wounds, blows, and assaults upon the person, especially where the injury is permanent, or endangers life; and for the same reason, the administration of poisons, that is, of certain drugs tending to de

range the vital functions, and to inflict pains of disease, such drugs, for instance, as alcohol and opium, are acts, the direct and inevitable tendency of which is, to inflict pain. They are, therefore, usually classed as wrong acts, though there are certain circumstances similar to those already pointed out in the case of homicide, which may render them, in certain cases, permissible, obligatory, and even. meritorious.

25. The same may be said of Restraint or Imprisonment, the infliction of which combines pains of muscular and mental activity, pains of inferiority, and the deprivation of many pleasures, which might other wise have been pursued and enjoyed.

26. Compulsion stands upon the same ground. It is the impelling a man by the pain of fear to submit to some other pain, such, for instance, as the pains of labor, falling under the head of pains of activity. Compulsion is always attended by a pain of inferiority, which makes it doubly disagreeable. It is, however, esteemed sometimes wrong, sometimes permissible, sometimes obligatory, and sometimes meritorious, according to the objects for which, and the circumstances under which, it is exercised. The state of Slavery includes all the evils of restraint and compulsion; and it is upon that ground that most recent moralists have maintained that to hold men in slavery is morally wrong. The prevalence of slavery, however, still causes it to be regarded by many as morally permissible.

27. Threats are the preliminary to compulsion,

and are one chief means of compulsion. Of course, they are to be regarded in the same light.

28. We come next to a class of personal injuries called Insults. These injuries, considering merely the bodily pain which they inflict, are often of the most trifling character; indeed, some of them inflict no bodily pain at all. They consist in such acts as merely touching a man with a stick, or shaking it over him, ejecting a drop of spittle into his face, or the applying to him a particular epithet, such as liar, or coward. These acts owe their injurious character entirely to the fact that they are conventionally used and understood as marks of contempt. The pain they inflict is a pain of inferiority; and to submit quietly to them is understood to imply a voluntary acquiescence in our own degradation. Now, inasmuch as the pain of inferiority is an essential auxiliary even to ordinary virtue, to show ourselves insensible to that pain, is regarded as indicating a depraved character.

Legislators, who generally look merely at the outside of things, have failed to comprehend the true character and serious nature of insults. They have regarded them as trifles unworthy the notice of the laws; and though, when seen in the light of provocations, their importance has been admitted, yet no enactments have been made to suppress and punish them. Hence it has happened that duelling, which offers a remedy, though often a very imperfect and a very expensive one against this sort of injuries, has survived all the homilies that have been uttered, and even all the laws that have been enacted, against it.

CHAPTER II.

RIGHTS OF PROPERTY. DUTIES AND CRIMES CORRELA TIVE TO THOSE RIGHTS.

1. LET us now pass to the consideration of the rights of property; of the duties which are correlative to those rights; and of the acts which are considered wrong, because they violate those rights.

Property, as Bentham has ably and clearly shown, is nothing but a Basis of expectation.* The idea of property consists in the expectation of being able to draw certain advantages from the thing possessed; an expectation, which in a limited number of cases, arises anterior to all law or convention, and affords a foundation for the earliest laws; such, for example, as the expectation entertained by men even in the most savage state, of deriving advantage from the huts they have built, the weapons they have made, the fruits they have gathered, the game they have taken, and the hunting grounds which they and their fathers have possessed. But in far the greater number of cases, at least in a civilized community, that basis of expectation which constitutes property owes not only its firmness and its certainty, but its total existence, to usage and mutual understanding, in one word, to Law.

2. To disappoint this expectation, to deprive a man of that which the law has authorized him to

*

Theory of Legislation, Vol. I. Principles of the Civil Code, Part I. ch. 8.

regard as his property, inflicts upon that man a pain of disappointment; it cuts him off from all the pleasures which the possession of that property might have conferred; and exposes him to suffer all those pains, against which the possession of that property might have enabled him to defend himself. An additional pain of inferiority is also attendant upon the idea of being plundered, whether by superior force or superior art. It is this latter pain which renders the idea of being cheated or robbed, even of a small amount, so very disagreeable.

3. All codes of morals, even those which exist among thieves, cheats, and robbers by profession, regard the violation of acknowledged rights of property as wrong and immoral. This, however, is only the case when those whose property is violated, are, to a greater or less degree, objects of our benevolence. If they are objects of our malevolence, the infliction. of pain upon them does not give us any pain; and we may even regard the violation of their rights of property, with a certain degree of moral approbation. Such is the case of a city taken by storm, and generally, of the plunder of enemies; such is the case of pulling down the houses and destroying the furniture of those who have become obnoxious to popular prejudice. The excessive obloquy attached to some particular violations of the right of property, such, for instance, as theft, is in a great measure artificial. Upon any just estimate, the moral turpitude of fraud is quite as great as that of theft.

4. Mystical doctors have given the most unlimited license to violations of the rights of property. It was