46 - Pardons

Summary

As punishments become milder, clemency and pardons become less necessary. Happy the nation in which they are harmful! Clemency, then, a virtue which has often complemented all the duties which attach to the sovereign's throne, should be redundant in a perfect administration where punishments are mild and the methods of judgement are regular and expeditious. This truth will seem hard to one who lives amid the chaos of a criminal system in which amnesties and pardons are called for in proportion to the absurdity of the laws and the awful severity of the sentences. Clemency is the most beautiful prerogative of the throne, it is the most desirable endowment of sovereignty and it is the tacit condemnation which the benevolent dispensers of the public happiness make of a code of laws which, for all its imperfections, has on its side the prejudice of ages, the voluminous and impressive tomes of innumerable commentators, the staid paraphernalia of endless procedural formalities, and the support of the most fawning and least feared semi-literates. But one ought to bear in mind that clemency is a virtue of the lawgiver and not of the laws' executor, that it ought to shine in the legal code and not in particular judgements. To show men that crimes can be pardoned, and that punishment is not their inevitable consequence, encourages the illusion of impunity and induces the belief that, since there are pardons, those sentences which are not pardoned are violent acts of force rather than the products of justice.