States (England, for example) which enjoy in this respect a noble and high-minded legislature.
It becomes necessary to examine, in the last place (now that we are treating of criminal law), a question that has assumed a high degree of importance by the efforts of modern legislation; the question, namely, as to how far the State is entitled or obliged to prevent crimes uncommitted. There is perhaps no public project which is animated by such a philanthropic design, and the sympathy which it inspires in every man of feeling is somewhat dangerous to the impartiality of the inquiry. Nevertheless, I cannot but consider such an inquiry especially necessary, since, if we consider the infinite variety of internal impulses from which the design of committing crime may proceed, it seems to me impossible to devise any method of wholly preventing such designs, and not only this, but actually hazardous to freedom, to prevent their execution. As I have already endeavoured to define the right of the State to limit the actions of individual men, I might seem to have already furnished an answer to this question. But when I found reason to determine, in that part of my inquiry, that the State should restrict those actions whose consequences might endanger the rights of others, I understood by these, (as the reasons I advanced in support of this position may show) such consequences as flow solely and of themselves from the action, and which might only be avoided perhaps by a greater amount of caution on the part of the agent. But when we speak of the prevention of crimes, we naturally mean the limitation of such actions only as give rise to a second, and that is, the commission of crime. Hence there is already this important difference, that the mind of the agent must here co-operate by a new decision; while in the former case it might either possess no influence whatever, or merely a negative one, by refraining
