“Art. 8. The law shall provide for such punishments only as are strictly and obviously necessary, and no one shall suffer punishment except it be legally inflicted in virtue of a law, passed and promulgated before the commission of the offence. “Art. 9. As all persons are held innocent until they shall have been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all severity not essential to the securing of the prisoner’s person shall be severely repressed by law.” That these three articles were aimed at no imaginary or very distant wrongs is evident from a cursory survey of the administration of the laws of France, and from the protests of French authors. _Lettres de cachet_, arbitrary imprisonments, retroactive laws, and cruelly exaggerated penalties were not uncommon. Mirabeau and Voltaire had both suffered under arbitrary laws and had painted the injustice of such laws in lurid colors. Mirabeau’s _Lettres de cachet_ and his _Essai sur le despotisme_ bristle with protests against the abuses of the old _régime_. The following gruesome picture is a suggestive statement of the way in which justice was administered in France in the eighteenth century: “The disproportion of crimes and of penalties was flagrant. A house thief was hung in 1733; an ecclesiastic, guilty of having found fault with the expulsion of the Jesuits, was also hung in 1762. The procedure was unjust and inhuman. The accused, assumed to be guilty in advance, ignorant of the crime with which he was charged, without counsellor or advocate, interrogated _à huis clos_, submitted to the preparatory question, was judged secretly. Once condemned, he was tortured before undergoing his punishment. And what punishment! For imprisonment, transportation or hanging was in vogue. The burning at the stake had fallen into desuetude, but the lash, branding with red-hot iron, the galleys, quartering, the rack, still did their savage work.”[20] Protests against these enormities were raised by the philosophers, and later by enlightened magistrates, such as Montesquieu, Servan, Linguet, and Malesherbes. In 1780, the “preparatory question” was abolished.[21] Mirabeau, in denouncing retroactive laws, says: “Nulle puissance humaine, ni surhumaine ne peut justifier l’effet rétroactif d’aucune loi.”[22] “Art. 10. No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.”