1785] Essays 5
maxim that has been long and generally approved;
never, that I know of, controverted. Even the sanguinary
 author of the Thoughts agrees to it (p. 163),
adding well, “‘that the very thought of injured innocence,
 and much more that of suffering nnocence,
must awaken all our tenderest and most compassionate
 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 preventang
 crimes. I have read, indeed, of a cruel Turk in
Barbary, who, whenever he bought a new Christian