Book Twenty-Nine - About The Manner of Composing The Laws

Summary

Chapter 1: About the Spirit of the Legislator

I say it, and it seems to me that I have made this work only to prove it: the spirit of moderation must be that of the legislator; the political good, like the moral good, is only found between two extremes. Here is an example.

The forms of justice are necessary for liberty. But their number could be so great that it would obstruct the goals that the laws themselves would have established: processes could have no end; the ownership of property could remain indeterminate; they could give one party the property of another without inquiry, or they could ruin both of them in the process of inquiry.

The citizens could lose their liberty and their safety, the complainants would no longer have the means to convince, and neither would the accused have the means to defend themselves.

Chapter 2: Continuing the Same Subject

Cecilius in Aulus-Gellius (a), discussing the Law of the Twelve Tables, which allowed the creditor to cut the insolvent debtor into morsels, justifies it by its very atrocity, which prevented that folk might borrow beyond their means (b). The cruelest laws, then, will be the best? The good will be the extreme, and all the relations of things will be destroyed?

Chapter 3: The Laws Which Seem to Distance Themselves from the Legislator's Aims Are Often Conformed to Them

Solon's law, which outlawed everyone who took no part in a sedition, seemed most extraordinary: but it's necessary to notice the circumstances in which Greece found itself in that era. It was divided into very small States: it was to be feared that in a republic stirred by civil dissensions, the most prudent folk might shelter themselves and lest things by that would be borne to an extremity.

In seditions that occurred in those petty states, the mass of the city entered the quarrel, or made it. In our large monarchies factions are formed by few folk, and the people would want to live uninvolved. In that case, it is natural to return the seditious into the mass of the citizens, not the mass of the citizens to the seditious: in the other case, it is necessary to unite the small number of wise and tranquil folk with the seditious: thus it is that the fermentation of one spirit can be halted by a single drop of another.