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quently, all past arrangements with regard to land are as open to be revised, amended, or abolished, as past arrangements with regard to actions called crimes, and, consequently, there is no such thing as "the rights of landed property" separated from the mere dictum of the law, which the nation has an undoubted right to alter or abolish whenever it shall see fit to do So. And if the nation were to resolve to resume and take back all lands which had been granted by the crown, (with considerations affecting those individuals who had purchased,) the nation would not be guilty of any crime, or wrong, or impropriety, but would be exactly in the same position as it is when it abolishes laws against witchcraft, or laws in favor of the slave trade, or laws which make it a legal crime to be a Jew or a Catholic.

Superstition, on this point, may endure for a few years longer; but no truth can be more certain than that God gave the land for the benefit of all; and if any arrangement interfere with or diminish that benefit, then has man, as man, as the recipient of God's bounty, an undoubted right to alter or abolish that arrangement, exactly as he alters his arrangements in agriculture, in medicine, in mechanics, or in navigation. No more crime, and no more wrong, attaches to his alterations in the one case than in the other.

We have now, therefore, opened up the way for a consideration of some of the effects that may reasonably be expected to follow the discovery of political science.

1st. The major proposition, "Crime ought to be prevented; and there ought to be laws, and an execu

tive administration of those laws, for the prevention of crime." This major proposition is not in dispute; and the progression of man in his political aspect does not consist in any alteration to be made in the major proposition.

2d. The minor proposition, "What is a crime? This and that action are crimes." In this minor lies the whole essence of political progression and political amelioration. Political improvement takes place exactly as men discover and definitely determine the true nature of crime; and exactly as they confine their laws to the prohibition of those actions which are crimes, and to the non-prohibition of those actions which are not crimes. The laws of man cannot make a crime, neither can they unmake a crime. Crime is logically anterior to human legislation; and the very end and intent of legislation, in its first and most essential capacity, is to prevent crime.

All nations with which we are acquainted have punished, as crimes, actions which were not crimes; and the gradual improvement of the laws of man in this respect is one of the great phenomena that we learn from history. On the gradual alteration of the laws (of Britain, for instance) may be based a most conclusive argument, that political science is undergoing a gradual process of discovery, those laws being altered invariably in accordance with a change of credence, gradually gaining ground with the population.

But while we have a positive major proposition, we have also a negative major proposition, which is,"No action that is not a crime ought to be prevented by the law."

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Now, as legislators and rulers are only men, (there is no divine wisdom nor divine sacredness about them,) they may be the criminals as well as any of the population; and if they assume powers and enforce laws which emanate from their will, (and not from an impartial judgment,) they are exactly in the case of an individual who commits crime by resorting to violence.

It is quite easy for the generality of writers on these subjects to treat of crime as committed by the population. They see so far, and sometimes their views are valuable and correct. But they have first perched the government on a great height, which they do not intend to survey, and then confine their observations to the subject population. To include both at one view appears a stretch beyond their power, and hence their admirable dissertations are unsatisfactory; and by unsatisfactory, we do not mean that they are not distinguished by talent of the highest order, and by upright sincerity; but that they treat

* "James I. was so accustomed to regard himself, and to be addressed by his flatterers as 'the Lord's anointed,' 'the vicegerent of God upon earth,' in fact, a kind of deputed deity, that he was constantly tempted to accuse his subjects of blasphemy and irreligion when they presumed to oppose his will, or to call in question his lawless assumptions of authority; at the same time, there was no form of impiety, from the light and irreverent mention of the sacred name in familiar speech, to profane cursing and swearing, and to the blasphemous and audacious assumption of a kind of parity with the Supreme Being, by which the lips and mind of the prince himself were undefiled. . . . . . James was the first of England to whom the unappropriate title of sacred majesty was applied.” — Miss AIKIN'S Mem. Court, James I.

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only one portion of the phenomenon, and omit its correlative. Exactly as if one were to write an able dissertation on the earth's motion, furnishing us with a perfect diagram and specification of the orbit, and an exact determination of the velocity, and yet should altogether omit to mention the sun. Such a dissertation, let its details be as perfect as they may, would be altogether unsatisfactory; because the correlative, the sun, has not been exhibited in its relations to the earth.

And so it is with crime. He who studies crime as a portion of man. science, (and not merely as accidentally treated of in this system of law that happens to be in force in Britain, or that system of law that happens to be in force in another country,) must include in his view the whole phenomenon, and must inquire what does man do, as man. And when we turn to Britain with this principle, we must regard the whole population, king, lores, commons, soldiers, judges, laborers, paupers, in fact, the whole mass of society, as merely men. And when we define crime, and find that actions coinciding with that definition are performed by any of these parties, by whatever name they may be called, or under whatever pretences they may appear, we must not hesitate to call the action by the name of crime, and to say, This is a crime committed by men. Reverence for law, as law, as a human rule of action de facto enacted by legislators, is mere debasing superstition; nor, however venerable law may be in some men's estimation, do we consider either their law or their worship of it at

all entitled to respect.* Men venerate law and care nothing for justice, just as they venerate the priest and forget the Deity. And if any legislature, or any king, commit an act, which act would not be equitable between two individuals, we no more hesitate to call it a crime in the one case as well as in the other. And when legislators, taking advantage of the superstitious, veneration which men still have for power and human authority, proceed to prohibit actions

* As an instance of the manner in which lawyers regard the social institutions of men, we may give the following quotation from Crabb's "History of English Law," p. 7:

"It is worthy of observation, that all the Saxon lawgivers showed great wisdom in the business of legislation, by admitting no laws into their selections but what were adapted to the temper and manners of their subjects, being for the most part taken from people that were nearly allied to themselves."

On the very next page, we have an illustration of the great wisdom of the Saxon lawgivers. "The Saxon people were divided into freemen and slaves."

Slavery, servitude, villenage, and every one of its modifications, is a political institution, though this fact is apt to be overlooked when the slave comes to be viewed as the property of another man. But what is politics? The system of rules which ought to prevail between man and man; and law ought to consist of those rules reduced to human enactment. Individual injustice may make a man a slave, and the action is a crime; but the criminality does not in the slightest degree diminish when the action is authorized by human laws. Now, in a country that has assumed the form of a state, slavery could not exist unless it were authorized by the law : and the evil influence of human law has been, that it sanctioned this, and many other abominations, using the armed force of the state for their continuance, and transmitting them to posterity as institutions under which men were born, and which, to a certain degree, were to them natural, or, rather, habitual.

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