If uncertainty is admitted, to any considerable degree, no quantity of evil will suffice. It is a fact, which experience has most fully established, and which is now recognized in the most vulgar legislation, that undue severity of punishment runs counter to its end. This it does by increasing uncertainty; because men are indisposed to be the instruments of inflicting evil by which their feelings are lacerated. That legislation, therefore, is bad, which does not take measures for the greatest possible degree of proximity and certainty in the punishments which it applies.

The sources are three, from which motives of the painful sort, applicable to the purposes of the legislator, are capable of being drawn:—1. The physical; 2dly, The moral; and, 3dly, The religious.

I. Pains from the Physical Source may be communicated to a man through,

1. His person,

2. His connections,

3. His property.

Through his person, they may be communicated in four principal ways,—by death, disablement, restraint and constraint, simple pain.

A man’s connections are either public or private; private, as spouse, parent, servant, master, &c.; public, as ruler, subject, teacher, scholar, and so on.

The modes in which a man is punished through his property need no explanation.

II. Pains, from the Moral Source, are the pains which are derived from the unfavourable sentiments of mankind. For the strength of the pains, derived from this source, we must refer to the writers who have treated of this part of human nature. It is sufficient here to advert to what is universally recognized, that these pains are capable of rising to a height, with which hardly any other pains, incident to our nature, can be compared; that there is a certain degree of unfavourableness in the sentiments of his fellow creatures, under which, hardly any man, not below the standard of humanity, can endure to live.

The importance of this powerful agency for the prevention of injurious acts, is too obvious to need to be illustrated. If sufficiently at command, it would almost supersede the use of other means. It is, therefore, one of the first objects to the legislator to know, in what manner he can employ the pains of the popular sanction with the greatest possible effect.

To know how to direct the unfavourable sentiments of mankind, it is necessary to know in as complete, that is, in as comprehensive a way as possible, what it is which gives them birth. Without entering into the metaphysics of the question, it is a sufficient practical answer, for the present purpose, to say, that the unfavourable sentiments of men are excited by every thing which hurts them. They love that which gives them pleasure; hate that which gives them pain. Those acts of other men which give them pleasure or save them from pain, acts of beneficence, acts of veracity, and so on, they love. Acts, on the other hand, which give them pain, mendacity, and so on, they hate. These sentiments, when the state of mind is contemplated out of which the acts are supposed to arise, are transformed into approbation and disapprobation, in all their stages and degrees; up to that of the highest veneration, down to that of the deepest abhorrence and contempt.

The unfavourable sentiments, which the legislator would excite towards forbidden acts, must, therefore, in each man, arise from his conception of the mischievousness of those acts. That conception depends upon three circumstances; 1st, The view which he himself takes of the act; 2dly, The view which appears to be taken by other people; 3dly, Every thing which operates to render more or less permanently present to his mind his own and other men’s conception of its mischievousness. From these circumstances, the practical rules for applying this great power, as an instrument of the legislator for the prevention of mischievous acts, are easily deduced. 1. Let the best measures be taken for giving the people a correct view of the mischievousness of the act; and then their unfavourable sentiments will be duly excited. 2. Let proper pains be taken that the people shall know every mischievous act that is committed, and know its author; that, so, no evil act may, by concealment, escape the punishment which their unfavourable sentiments imply. 3. Let the legislature, as the leading section of the public, make publication of its own unfavourable sentiments; let it brand the act with infamy. 4. Let the same publication of his own unfavourable sentiments be made by the judge in the shape of reprimand and other declarations. 5.