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Updated: June 5, 2025
At this period he made the discovery, or what he held to be the discovery, which governed his whole future career. He laid down the principle which was to give the clue to all his investigations; and, as he thought, required only to be announced to secure universal acceptance. When Bentham revolted against the intellectual food provided at school and college, he naturally took up the philosophy which at that period represented the really living stream of thought. To be a man of enlightenment in those days was to belong to the school of Locke. Locke represented reason, free thought, and the abandonment of prejudice. Besides Locke, he mentions Hume, Montesquieu, Helvétius, Beccaria, and Barrington. Helvétius especially did much to suggest to him his leading principle, and upon country trips which he took with his father and step-mother, he used to lag behind studying Helvétius' De l'Esprit. Locke, he says in an early note (1773-1774), should give the principles, Helvétius the matter, of a complete digest of the law. He mentions with especial interest the third volume of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature for its ethical views: 'he felt as if scales fell from his eyes' when he read it. Daines Barrington's Observations on the Statutes interested him by miscellaneous suggestions. The book, he says, was a 'great treasure. 'It is everything,
Only in the XIX century did she evince a tardy interest in these doctrines, just as she tardily contributed to them at the dose of the XVIII century through the works of Beccaria and Filangeri.
Do not the names of Algarotti, Bettinelli, Beccaria, Filengieri, almost belong to France? What shall I say of the famous Gottschedt? Shall I recall the fact that in his victorious struggle against Voltaire, Lessing had to call in Diderot's assistance?
This is so true, that when Cesare Beccaria opened the great historic cycle of the classic school of criminology, he was assaulted by the critics of his time with the same indictments which were brought against us a century later.
Beccaria, and other writers on crimes and punishments, had satisfied the reasonable world of the unrightfulness and inefficacy of the punishment of crimes by death; and hard labor on roads, canals, and other public works, had been suggested as a proper substitute. The Revisors had adopted these opinions; but the general idea of our country had not yet advanced to that point.
When the voyagers laughed at this legend, the priest of the village showed them, on the early chart of Bianco, the name of "De la Man Satanagio," and on that of Beccaria the name "Satanagio" alone, both these being the titles of islands.
The distress of the people, the laborers without bread, the last Prince de Conde engulfed in the shadows, Brussels expelling the Nassaus as Paris did the Bourbons, Belgium offering herself to a French Prince and giving herself to an English Prince, the Russian hatred of Nicolas, behind us the demons of the South, Ferdinand in Spain, Miguel in Portugal, the earth quaking in Italy, Metternich extending his hand over Bologna, France treating Austria sharply at Ancona, at the North no one knew what sinister sound of the hammer nailing up Poland in her coffin, irritated glances watching France narrowly all over Europe, England, a suspected ally, ready to give a push to that which was tottering and to hurl herself on that which should fall, the peerage sheltering itself behind Beccaria to refuse four heads to the law, the fleurs-de-lys erased from the King's carriage, the cross torn from Notre Dame, Lafayette lessened, Laffitte ruined, Benjamin Constant dead in indigence, Casimir Perier dead in the exhaustion of his power; political and social malady breaking out simultaneously in the two capitals of the kingdom, the one in the city of thought, the other in the city of toil; at Paris civil war, at Lyons servile war; in the two cities, the same glare of the furnace; a crater-like crimson on the brow of the people; the South rendered fanatic, the West troubled, the Duchesse de Berry in la Vendee, plots, conspiracies, risings, cholera, added the sombre roar of tumult of events to the sombre roar of ideas.
On the other hand, solitary confinement came in with the second current of the classic school of criminology, when at the same time, in which Beccaria promulgated his ideas, John Howard traveled all over Europe describing the unmentionable horrors of mass imprisonment, which became a center of infection for society at large.
Louis Philippe annotated Beccaria with his own hand. After the Fieschi machine, he exclaimed: "What a pity that I was not wounded! Then I might have pardoned!" On another occasion, alluding to the resistance offered by his ministry, he wrote in connection with a political criminal, who is one of the most generous figures of our day: "His pardon is granted; it only remains for me to obtain it."
But it is equally true that, under this arrangement, both Howe and Penn got as entire liberty to preach as they could have had under the most philosophical code that Beccaria or Jefferson could have framed. The progress of the bill was easy. Only one amendment of grave importance was proposed.
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