Such are the foundations of that power of judging and punishing which is entire society. Society has not made those principles for its own use; they are much anterior to it, they are contemporaneous with thought and the soul, and upon these rests society, with its laws and its institutions. Laws are legitimate by their relation to these eternal laws. The surest power of institutions resides in the respect that these principles bear with them and extend to every thing that participates in them. Education develops them, it does not create them. They direct the legislator who makes the law, and the judge who applies it. They are present to the accused brought before the tribunal, they inspire every just sentence, they give it authority in the soul of the condemned, and in that of the spectator, and they consecrate the employment of force necessary for his execution. Take away a single one of these principles, and all human justice is overthrown, no longer is there any thing but a mass of arbitrary conventions which no one in conscience is bound to respect, which may be violated without remorse, which are sustained only by the display of extreme punishments. The decisions of such a justice are not true judgments, but acts of force, and civil society is only an arena where men contend with each other without duties and rights, without any other object than that of procuring for themselves the greatest possible amount of enjoyment, of procuring it by conquest and preserving it by force or cunning, save throwing over all that the cloak of hypocritical laws.