take revenge were more responsible for his severities than the desire to turn to the service of the common weal the penalty that he would inflict on almost all the rebels.  Criminals who are executed are considered to expiate their crimes so completely by the loss of their life, that the public requires nothing more, and is indignant when executioners are clumsy.  These would be stoned if they were known deliberately to give repeated strokes of the axe; and the judges who are present at the execution would not be immune from danger if they were thought to take pleasure in this evil sport of the executioners, and to have surreptitiously urged them to practise it.’ (Note that this is not to be understood as strictly universal.  There are cases where the people approve of the slow killing of certain criminals, as when Francis I thus put to death some persons accused of heresy after the notorious Placards of 1534.  No pity was shown to Ravaillac, who was tortured in divers horrible ways.  See the French Mercury, vol.  I, fol. m., 455 et seq. See also Pierre Matthieu in his History of the Death of Henry IV; and do not forget what he says on page m. 99 concerning the discussion by the judges with regard to the torture of this parricide.) ’Finally it is an exceptionally notorious fact that Rulers who should be guided by St. Paul, I mean who should condemn to the extreme penalty all those whom he condemns to eternal death, would be accounted enemies of the human kind and destroyers of their communities.  It is incontestable that their laws, far from being fitted, in accordance with the aim of legislators, to uphold society, would be its complete ruin. (Apply here these words of Pliny the Younger, Epist., 22, lib. 8:  Mandemus memoriae quod vir mitissimus, et ob hoc quoque maximus, Thrasea crebro dicere solebat, Qui vitia odit, homines odit.)’ He adds that it was said of the laws of Draco, an Athenian lawgiver, that they had not been written with ink, but with blood, because they punished all sins with the extreme penalty, and because damnation is a penalty even worse than death.  But it must be borne in mind that damnation is a consequence of sin.  Thus I [205] once answered a friend, who raised as an objection the disproportion existing between an eternal punishment and a limited crime, that there is no injustice when the continuation of the punishment is only a result of the continuation of the sin.  I will speak further on this point later.  As for the number of the damned, even though it should be incomparably greater among men than the number of the saved, that would not preclude the possibility that in the universe the happy creatures infinitely outnumber those who are unhappy.  Such examples as that of a prince who punishes only the leaders of rebels or of a general who has a regiment decimated, are of no importance here.  Self-interest compels the prince and the general to pardon the guilty, even though they should remain wicked.  God only