35 - Asylums

Summary

Two questions remain to be considered: the first is whether it is just that there be places of asylum, and whether it is useful or not to have extradition treaties between different countries. Within a country's borders there should be no place which is outside the law. Its power should follow every citizen like a shadow. Impunity and asylum differ only in degree, and since the certainty of punishment makes more of an impression than its harshness, asylums invite men to commit crimes more than punishments deter them from them. To increase the number of asylums is to create so many little sovereign states, because where the law does not run, there new laws can be framed opposed to the common ones and there can arise a spirit opposed to that of the whole body of society. The whole of history shows that great revolutions, both in states and in the views of men, have issued forth from places of asylum. But as to whether extradition is useful I would not dare to say until there are laws better suited to human needs, and more lenient punishments that put an end to dependence on fickleness and mere opinion, so that persecuted innocence and despised virtue are protected; until tyranny has been banished to the vast plains of Asia by that universal reason which ever more closely unites the interests of the throne and its subjects.