emotions which it is the chief object of civilization to extinguish
for ever, and in the extinction of which alone there can be any
hope of better institutions than those under which men now misgovern
one another. Men feel that their revenge is gratified, and that
their security is established by the extinction and the sufferings
of beings, in most respects resembling themselves; and their daily
occupations constraining them to a precise form in all their thoughts,
they come to connect inseparably the idea of their own advantage
with that of the death and torture of others. It is manifest that
the object of sane polity is directly the reverse; and that laws
founded upon reason, should accustom the gross vulgar to associate
their ideas of security and of interest with the reformation, and
the strict restraint, for that purpose alone, of those who might
invade it.

The passion of revenge is originally nothing more than an habitual
perception of the ideas of the sufferings of the person who inflicts
an injury, as connected, as they are in a savage state, or in such
portions of society as are yet undisciplined to civilization, with
security that that injury will not be repeated in future. This
feeling, engrafted upon superstition and confirmed by habit, at
last loses sight of the only object for which it may be supposed
to have been implanted, and becomes a passion and a duty to be
pursued and fulfilled, even to the destruction of those ends to
which it originally tended. The other passions, both good and evil.
Avarice, Remorse, Love, Patriotism, present a similar appearance;
and to this principle of the mind over-shooting the mark at which
it aims, we owe all that is eminently base or excellent in human
nature; in providing for the nutriment or the extinction of which,
consists the true art of the legislator. [Footnote: The savage and