522 POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



regard to the magnitude of the crime than to the audacity of 

 the attempt to transgress the hallowed laws of the empire.&quot; 

 And then, beyond the criminality which disobeying the ruler 

 involves, there is the criminality involved by damaging the 

 ruler s property, where his subjects and their services belong 

 wholly or partly to him. In the same way that maltreating 

 a slave, and thereby making him less valuable, comes to be 

 considered as an aggression on his owner in the same way 

 that even now among ourselves a father s ground for proceed 

 ing against a seducer is loss of his daughter s services ; so, 

 where the relation of people to monarch is servile, there arises 

 the view that injury done by one person to another, is injury 

 done to the monarch s property. An extreme form of this 

 view is alleged of Japan, where cutting and maiming of the 

 king s dependents &quot; becomes wounding the king, or regicide.&quot; 

 And hence the general principle, traceable in European juris 

 prudence from early days, that a transgression of man against 

 man is punishable mainly, or in large measure, as a trans 

 gression against the State. It was thus in ancient Eome : 

 &quot; every one convicted of having broken the public peace, 

 expiated his offence with his life.&quot; An early embodiment 

 of the principle occurs in the Salic law, under which &quot; to the 

 weJirgeld is added, in a great number of cases, . . . the fred, 

 a sum paid to the king or magistrate, in reparation for the 

 violation of public peace ; &quot; and in later days, the fine paid 

 to the State absorbed the wehrgeld. Our own history simi 

 larly shows us that, as authority extends and strengthens, the 

 guilt of disregarding it takes precedence of intrinsic guilt. 

 &quot; The king s peace was a privilege which attached to the 

 sovereign s court and castle, but which he could confer on 

 other places and persons, and which at once raised greatly 

 the penalty of misdeeds committed in regard to them.&quot; 

 Along with the growing check on the right of private revenge 

 for wrongs along with the increasing subordination of minor 

 and local jurisdictions along with that strengthening of a 

 central authority which these changes imply, &quot;offences against 



