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Updated: May 4, 2025
For there is a standing lie in the very constitution of civil society, a necessity of error, misleading us as to the proportions of crime. Mere necessity obliges man to create many acts into felonies, and to punish them as the heaviest offences, which his better sense teaches him secretly to regard as perhaps among the lightest.
From this point of view, the admirable campaign of agitation and propaganda undertaken by M. Jules Destrée, author of En Italie, was of an importance and possessed consequences which are beyond comparison with anything else accomplished and which are difficult to realize by those who were not present at one or other of the meetings at which, for more than six months, indefatigably, travelling from town to town, from the smallest to the most populous, he uttered the distressful complaint of martyred Belgium, unveiling the lies, the felonies, the monstrosities and the acts of devastation perpetrated by the barbarian horde and making heard, with sovran eloquence, the august voice of outraged justice and of baffled right.
It is wide of my purpose to dwell any longer on those crimes which are by the laws styled properly against God, seeing none of the persons mentioned in the following work were executed for doing anything against them. Let us therefore pass on to the second great branch of the Crown Law, viz., offences immediately against the King, and these are either treasons or felonies.
On the subject of the Criminal law, all were agreed, that the punishment of death should be abolished, except for treason and murder; and that, for other felonies, should be substituted hard labor in the public works, and, in some cases, the Lex talionis. How this last revolting principle came to obtain our approbation, I do not remember.
Fleta, L. 1. c. 22 § 4 Lord Hale thinks it was deemed petty treason at common law. 1 H. P. C. 220, 224. The bringing in false money with intent to merchandise, and make payment of it is treason, by 25 E. 3. But the best proof of the intention, is the act of passing it, and why not leave room for repentance here, as in other cases of felonies intended?
The report authorizes congress to appoint "courts for the trial of all crimes, frauds, and piracies committed on the high seas, or on any navigable river not within a county or parish." The confederation limits the jurisdiction to "piracies and felonies committed on the high seas."
Intentionally maiming another by cutting out or disabling the tongue or any other member or limb; inveigling or kidnapping; decoying and taking away children; exposing children in the street to abandon them; committing or attempting an assault with intent to kill, or to commit any other felony, or in resisting the execution of a legal process; administering poison without producing death; poisoning any well or spring of water; are all felonies, and punishable as such.
Some other statutes of the same nature in respect to lottery tickets, etc., have been made to create felonies of the counterfeiting thereof, but of these and some other later Statutes, I forbear mentioning here, because I have spoken particularly of them in the cases where persons have been punished for transgressing them.
It is estimated by competent authorities, basing their estimate upon the number of known convictions of crime in certain large cities, that there are not less than 1,000,000 convictions for crime, annually, in the United States including, of course, convictions for both felonies and misdemeanors.
The right to borrow and coin money and to fix its value and that of foreign coin are important to the establishment of a National Government, and particularly necessary in support of the right to declare war, as, indeed, may be considered the right to punish piracy and felonies on the high seas and offenses against the laws of nations.
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