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AN ENQUIRY INTO THE EFFECTS OF PUBLIC PUNISHMENTS UPON CRIMINALS, AND UPON SOCIETY.
THE design of punishment is said to be,—1st, to reform the person who suffers it,—2dly, to prevent the perpetration of crimes, by exciting terror in the minds of spectators; and,—3dly, to remove those persons from society, who have manifested, by their tempers and crimes, that they are unfit to live in it.
FROM the first institution of governments, in every age and country (with only a few exceptions) legislators have thought that punishments should be public, in order to produce the two first of these intentions. It will require some fortitude to combat opinions that have been sancti|fied by such long and general prejudice, and supported by universal practice. But truth in government, as well as in philosophy, is of pro|gressive growth. As in philosophy, we often arrive at truth by reject|ing the evidence of our senses; so in government, we often arrive at it after divorcing our first thoughts. Reason, tho' deposed and op|pressed, is the only just sovereign of the human mind. Discoveries, it is true, have been made by accident; but they have derived their credit and usefulness only from their according with the decisions of reason.
IN medicine, above every other branch of philosophy, we perceive many instances of the want of relation between the apparent cause and effect. Who, by reasoning a priori, would suppose, that the hot regi|men was not preferable to the cold, in the treatment of the small-pox? But experience teaches us, that this is not the case. Cause and effect appear to be related in philosophy, like the objects of chymistry. Si|milar