Note 14 — Chapter I · THE PRECURSORS. AUTHORS WHO TREATED THE SUBJECT BEFORE THE BIRTH OF MODERN CRIMINAL SCIENCE.

“In China they punish the mandarin in the department in which a great crime has been committed. A bad government has its own negligence or its own injustice to blame for the great number of malefactors who are found in a state. The multiplicity of criminals proclaims an administration as tyrannical and careless. The severity of taxes, the vexations and hardships inflicted by the rich and great multiply the number of the unfortunate, whom poverty often reduces to despair and who avail themselves of crime as the promptest means of escape from their condition. If wealth is the mother of vices, poverty is the mother of crimes. When a state is badly governed and wealth is too unequally divided, so that millions of men lack the necessaries of life, while a small number of citizens are surfeited with luxuries, there we commonly see a great number of criminals, whose number punishments do not diminish. If a government punishes the unfortunate it leaves undisturbed the vices that are leading the state to its ruin; it erects gibbets for the poor, whereas by bringing men to poverty it has itself made thieves, assassins, and criminals of every kind; it punishes crime, while it continually invites men to commit crime.”14