It is but too well known, that the pleasures respectively belonging to these conditions are liable to vanish, and at any rate to be alloyed by a corresponding set of pains. These pains are too obvious to need insisting on. The value of any such condition May therefore be either positive or negative; in plain terms, a man may either be the better for it or the worse. Where the value of it is positive, it will consist of the sum of the values of the several pleasures after that of the several pains had been deducted: when negative, as the sum of the value of the pains after that of the pleasure has been deducted. When therefore the value of any such condition happens to be negative, a sentence taking a man out of it, must needs operate not as a punishment but as a reward.
With regard to those pleasures or benefits which are common to several of the above conditions, it is manifest that, though the pleasure is in each of these several cases nominally the same, they are liable to be very different in point of value. Thus the pleasure of contributing to the happiness of the person who forms the other term in the relation, is incident to the condition of parent, and also that of a guardian: but it is more certain and more vivid in the case of the father than in that of the guardian. To engage, however, further in such details, besides their being so obvious, would lead us from the subject of politics to that of morals.
Let us now proceed to consider the manner in which the several forfeitures may be produced, or, as the case be, any part of them may be employed as an instrument of punishment.
The advantages of the conjugal condition may be substracted as a punishment by a judicial sentence, declaring that the offender is loot, or shall not be any longer considered as the husband or wife of the person in question.
The consequence of such sentence would be, not completely to destroy the advantages of that condition, but to render them precarious.
If after this sentence has been pronounced they cohabit, or are suspected of cohabiting together, the woman is considered as a concubine. When this sort of connexion is known to subsist, it is in some countries punished by the moral sanction, in others, both by the moral and political. By legal divorce, a man is also deprived in the whole or in part of the inexigible services derived from the right he has over the property of his wife, and especially of those services derived from cohabitation, it would make him dependant upon her with respect to the testamentary disposition over such part of her property of which she might have an absolute power of disposal.
With respect to the pleasures derivable from the relation of father, the law, it is true, cannot deprive a man altogether of the pleasures connected with this condition, but it may be greatly embittered; as, for example, by a retrospective sentence, declaring his children to be illegitimate Upon those who might be born subsequent to the sentence of divorce, the punishment would fall with much greater certainty, for the public opinion, which would not be forward in supporting the degradation of children born under the faith of lawful wedlock, would not exercise the same indulgence towards those who were born after a divorce.
The paternal and filial condition may, in so far as the nature of the case admits of it, be in the same manner substracted by a judicial sentence, declaring that the offender is not, or shall no longer be considered as, the father or the son of the person in question.
The certain effects of a sentence of the kind in question, in respect of the father, would be to deprive him of all legal power over the person of his child: in respect of the child, to deprive him of taking by inheritance or representation the property of his father.
As to the other advantages derivable from these relations, the sentence may or may not have any effect, according to the feelings of the parties interested: its operation will depend upon the father and the sons upon their more immediate connections, and upon the public in general.
As to the office of guardian and other offices of a fiduciary nature, the sentence will operate to the whole extent of those offices: a legal interdiction of all the acts annuls all the advantages issuing from them.
It may at first sight appear extraordinary that a power should be attributed to the magistrate, of destroying relations founded in nature. It is, it may be observed, an event---an event that has already happened; and how can it be in the power of any human tribunal to cause that which has taken place, not to have taken place? This cannot be accomplished; but the magistrate may have power to persuade people to believe that an event has happened in a manner different from what it actually did happen. It is true that, upon the parties themselves, and upon the persons who have a direct knowledge of the fact, the power of the magistrate, as to this purpose, is altogether nugatory, but with the public at large an assertion so sanctioned would have the greatest weight. The principal obstacle to the exercise of any such power, however, is, that a declaration to this effect as a penal instrument would, upon the face of it, bear marks of its own falsehood. This is a dilemma from which there is no escaping. If the offender is not the father of the person in question, to declare that he is not is not an act of punishment: if he is his father, the declaration is false.
The idea of employing as a mode of punishment the subtraction of any of the rights attached to the several conditions as above, is not however so extravagant as at first might be imagined. If not the same thing, what approaches very near to it is already in use.
This object may be effected in two modes; one, the endeavouring to cause it to be believed that the offender does not stand in the relation of father or of son, as the case may be, to the person regarded as such: the other is in endeavouring to cause it to be believed that from the non-observance of some legal form, the progeny is illegitimate.
A case somewhat analogous to this, is that famous one upon which so many volumes have been written---corruption of blood; or, in other words, the perfection of inheritable blood. The plain object, stripped of all disguise, is to prevent a man from inheriting, as he would have done if this punishment had not been pronounced: but what is endeavoured to be done by the help of this expression is, to cause it to be believed that the blood of the person in question undergoes some real alteration, which is a part of the punishment.
Another example in which, at least in words, a control is assumed over events of the description of those in question, is by that barbarous maxim that a bastard is the son of no one; a maxim which has a tendency, as much as it is in the power of words to give it, to deprive a man of all parental connexions. It is not, however, ever employed as a punishment.
Another example, opposite to the preceding one, is that other legal maxim, pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant: a maxim by which sanction is frequently given to a palpable falsehood. By recent decisions, the severity of this rule has however been relaxed, it being now settled that though marriage is to be considered as presumptive proof of filiation, it may be rebutted by evidence of the impossibility of any connexion having taken place.
In France, a mode of punishment has been employed which, it is true, without any such pretence as that of destroying the fact of parentage, endeavoured, as far as might be, to abolish all trace of it, by imposing on the person in question the obligation of changing his name.
The same punishment has been employed in Portugal.
The punishment, consisting in the forfeiture of credibility, is another example, no less remarkable, of an attempt to exercise a despotic control over the opinions of men. As part of the punishment for many sorts of offenses, which do not import any want of veracity, the offender is declared to; have lost all title to credence: the visible sign of this punishment is the not being permitted to depose in a court of justice.
The forfeiture of the conjugal condition, at least to a certain extent, is frequently among the consequences of imprisonment, especially when with imprisonment is combined penal labour. This part of the punishment is not formally denounced, but it is not the less real. It is not ever in express terms declared that a man is divested of this condition; but he is in fact precluded from the principal enjoyments of it, and the condition separate from the pleasures that belong to it is evidently nothing more than a mere name. The forfeiture is temporary or perpetual, according as the imprisonment is either one or the other.