Chap. XIII.... We should not separate the laws from the purposes for which they were established: of the Roman laws agai

This chapter contains nothing but what is right, but the title seems to announce something extraordinary, which the chapter does not contain. The proposition that the receiver of stolen goods, should be punished in the same manner as the thief, is not a law, but a general maxim, true or false; if it be true, the laws of France and the Romans, are equally good or bad; either when they operate against the thief or the receiver; if it be false, both are necessarily bad as respects one of them.

The distinction between open robbery and robbery that is not open, requires no illustration from a law of Lacedemon. The difference of punishment could have no other motive than the certainty of the one kind of robbery, and the difficulty of proving the other; and as the second was only punished by a fine, this distinction is not unreasonable, because a receiver, an imprudent purchaser, or a person of bad character, may be, without injustice, condemned to this double fine. These are cases in which our tribunals do not take the life of the culprit, but they condemn to the galleys for life an assassin or a poisoner, under the fiction that he is not absolutely convicted but only nearly so. This kind of jurisprudence would be natural enough among a people in a half savage state, who look upon the punishment of crimes rather as an act of vengeance regulated by law, than an act of civil justice.

The distinction between the punishment of those who have reached the age of puberty, and those who have not, does not require to be explained by the laws of Lacedemon, or the reasonings of Plato on the laws of the island of Crete: it is founded on this, that those under the age of puberty are supposed not to possess either the full use of reason, or a proper knowlege of the laws of society.