out designing to operate on their causes in the citizen's character, endeavours only to prevent the actual commission of them. This is the least immediately hurtful to freedom, as it leads least of all to the exercise of any positive influence. However, this method also admits of greater or less extension of its sphere and operation. For the State may content itself with exercising the most watchful vigilance on every unlawful project, and defeating it before it has been put into execution; or, advancing further, it may prohibit actions which are harmless in themselves, but which tempt to the commission of crime, or afford opportunities for resolving upon criminal actions. This latter policy, again, tends to encroach on the liberty of the citizens; manifests a distrust on the part of the State which not only operates hurtfully on the character of the citizens, but goes to defeat the very end in view; and is disapproved by the very reasons which seemed to me to argue against the methods of preventing crime before-mentioned. All that the State may do, without frustrating its own end, and without encroaching on the freedom of its citizens, is, therefore, restricted to the former course,—that is, the strictest surveillance of every transgression of the law, either already committed or only resolved on; and as this cannot properly be called preventing the causes of crime, I think I may safely assert that this prevention of criminal actions is wholly foreign to the State's proper sphere of activity. But only the more assiduously must it endeavour to provide that no crime committed shall remain undiscovered, and that no offence discovered shall escape unpunished, or even punished more leniently than the law strictly demands. For the conviction in the minds of the citizens,—a conviction strengthened by unvarying experience,—that it is impossible for them to infringe on the rights of others without suffering a proportionate loss of their own, seems to me at once the only bulwark of internal security, and the only
