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HOMICIDE - of Infants [BR][8] CHILD MURDER
MOTIVES UNPERCEIVED — Exposition of Infants
A striking confirmation and it should seem a satisfactory instance exemplification of the truth of this proposition, The truth of this proposition is exemplified in a striking, and as it should seem satisfactory instance that
reasons may influence exercise a real tho' unperceived influence on the minds of men, + tho' unperceived by themselves + notwithstanding those very men do not perceive it
is to be taken met with in from the practise prevalent authorized by the <add>institutions Laws of</add> among so many intelligent & polished
of parents exposing new born children to death at pleasure — Now I say 1st that the conduct of the
respective legislators was governed in the establishment or permission of this was
governed by this consideration reason that what the mischief I have called the mischief of the 2d & 3d
orders is wanting in the murders; to such killings portions which as I have shewn compose in almost
the whole of the aggregate mass of mischief resulting from that crime: + + the small over-plus (what they want of doing so, bury only that which affects population, as which which it was not any part of the ordinary policy of those nations to encourage & the remaining portion slight small as it is in comparison with those others is what they were not [ordinarily] accustomed to regard consider as so being. 2d and yet of this
reason they were not aware
1.st They were not aware of it because if they had been, some one person in all
this time would have assigned it, & the institution would not have been treated as it seems to
have been all along been by writers eminent Hume Young, Warb Dialogue — Warburton Dir-Legation. Ed. 1766. Vol. 1st 107. & 319. as well as trivial as the result of local
prejudice and caprice
2.d It was that that influenced them, because in none no one of those nations was there
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a depriving of punishment of the highest Bond in the cases of killing where those were it fails mischiefs do
subsist. & what cause but this for the difference can be assigned?
It was strictly speaking rather the absence the Impressions produced by the crime not practise when attended with the secondary mischief that was the cause of the dissonance of the treatment bestowed We are not to conceive that their first violation was to proscribe punish killing in general, & then made, in favor of this sort of killing, an exception: but that they originally took a resolution against that sort of killing some time that they never took any against this. An Idea of the confused light in which this matter has usually been beholden may be
taken, and in which to have beholden it is therefore no peculiar reproach [to any one to have
viewed it in] may be taken from what Dr Washop of Gloucester one of the latest writers of that
description has said of it, who if his Ideas notions had been clear about the matter, would not
have spoken of it even (tho' offering itself to his consideration only cursorily & incidentally)
as he has done.
He is speaking of the phantom of (the what is technically called) the moral Lens which making it the joint & not the sole measure standard of right & wrong
he is of itself an insufficient barrier to to use his own expression for I fear in matters of such nicety to misrepresent against vicious Customs, are to They had perpetual occasion to a perceived (& that perpetually) the terror & alarm spread by the slaughter of one another by men at large — they had no such perception with the respect to the killing of a new-born infant; thus far then the distinction they made between the 2 cases was a distinction (as one should term it in French) raisonné It was not that they perceived there was no terror produced in the latter case; but that they did not perceive there was any produced: perceiving that there was in the Levy
"Almost infinite (says he that distinguished writer) are the popular Customs, [in the several vitious ages &
"of mankind,] which owe their birth to the more violent passions of fear, Lust &
Anger. The most whimsical & capricious as well as the most inhuman & unnatural,
have arisen from thence. It must be needs therefore be, that customs of this
original should be as opposite to the moral Sense, as those appetites are from whom
they were derived. And of how great power Custom was is to erase the strongest im-
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