Essays of Benjamin Franklin

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1752429486

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-127700

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Franklin, Benjamin http://d-nb.info/gnd/118534912

Title:: Essays of Benjamin Franklin

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: G. P. Putnam's Sons

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: xi, 273 Seiten

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: XXX. To Bejamin Vaughan

Collection:: Economics Books

1785] Essays 5 maxim that has been long and generally approved; never, that I know of, controverted. Even the san- guinary author of the Thoughts agrees to it (p. 163), adding well, “‘that the very thought of injured inno- cence, and much more that of suffering nnocence, must awaken all our tenderest and most compas- sionate feelings, and at the same time raise our highest indignation against the instruments of it. But,” he adds, ‘“‘there is no danger of esther, from a strict adherence to the laws.” Really! Is it then impossible to make an unjust law? and if the law itself be unjust, may it not be the very ‘instrument ”’ which ought to “raise the author's and everybody's highest indignation’? I read, in the last newspaper from London, that a woman is capitally convicted at the Old Bailey, for privately stealing out of a shop some gauze, value fourteen shillings and threepence; is there any proportion between the injury done by a theft, value fourteen shillings and threepence, and the punishment of a human creature, by death, on a gibbet? Might not that woman, by her labor, have made the reparation ordained by God, in paying fourfold? Is not all punishment inflicted beyond the merit of the offence, so much punishment of innocence? In this light, how vast is the annual quantity of not only injured, but suffering innocence, in almost all the civilized states of Europe! But it seems to have been thought that this kind of innocence may be punished by way of prevent- ang crimes. I have read, indeed, of a cruel Turk in Barbary, who, whenever he bought a new Christian

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