The sanction of law is punishment. We have already seen that the right to punish springs from the idea of demerit.[243] In the universal order, to God alone it belongs to apply a punishment to all faults, whatever they may be. In the social order, government is invested with the right to punish only for the purpose of protecting liberty by imposing a just reparation on those who violate it. Every fault that is not contrary to justice, and does not strike at liberty, escapes, then, social retribution. Neither is the right to punish the right of avenging one's self. To render evil for evil, to demand an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, is the barbarous form of a justice without light; for the evil that I do you will not take away the evil that you have done me. It is not the pain felt by the victim that demands a corresponding pain; it is violated justice that imposes on the culpable man the expiation of suffering. Such is the morality of penalty. The principle of penalty is not the reparation of damage caused. If I have caused you damage without intending it, I pay you an indemnity; that is not a penalty, for I am not culpable; whilst if I have committed a crime, in spite of the material indemnity for the evil that I have done, I owe a reparation to justice by a proper suffering, and in that truly consists the penalty. What is the exact proportion of chastisements and crimes? This question cannot receive an absolute solution. What is here immutable, is that the act opposed to justice merits a punishment, and that the more unjust the act is, the severer ought to be the punishment. But by the side of the right to punish is the duty of correcting. To the culprit must be left the possibility of repairing his crime. The culpable man is still a man; he is not a thing of which we ought to rid ourselves as soon as it becomes injurious, a stone that falls on our heads, that we throw into a gulf that it may wound no more. Man is a rational being, capable of comprehending good and evil, of repenting, and of being one day reconciled with order. These truths have given birth to works that honor the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. The conception of houses of correction reminds one of those early times of Christianity when punishment consisted in an expiation that permitted the culprit to return through repentance to the ranks of the just. Here intervenes, as we have just indicated, the principle of charity, which is very different from the principle of justice. To punish is just, to ameliorate is charitable. In what measure ought those two principles to be united? Nothing is more delicate, more difficult to determine. It is certain that justice ought to govern. In undertaking the amendment of the culprit, government usurps, with a very generous usurpation, the rights of religion; but it ought not to go so far as to forget its proper function and its rigorous duty.