From an article in The New Yorker about the murderous streak in American history:
Long ago, Beccaria (Cesare Beccaria, the Italian author of 1764’s “On Crimes and Punishment”) pointed out the meaningfulness of the correspondence, over time, between crime and punishment, between one kind of violence and another. If the history of murder contains a lesson, Beccaria believed, it was this: “The countries and times most notorious for severity of punishment have always been those in which the bloodiest and most inhumane of deeds were committed.”
Rom 5.20: “The law was added so that the trespass might increase“.
"As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for school-boys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence of crime. It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the more crime is produced…."
— Oscar Wilde
"The Soul of Man Under Socialism"
John-
that is the most amazing quote! sort of deserves a post of its own…
i've never read wilde's essays, only his novels/short stories. where should i begin?!
dz