ABSTRACT
This chapter examines whether it is useful to place a price on the head of a man known to be guilty, by arming every citizen and so making each one into an executioner. Either the offender is outside the country's borders or inside: in the former the sovereign encourages citizens to commit a crime and exposes them to punishment, which causes injury and usurpation of his authority over other men. By these actions he authorizes other nations to do the same to himself. The latter case reveals the sovereign's true weakness. He who has the power to defend himself does not seek to buy it. Even more, such a decree upsets all moral ideas and virtue, which at the slightest breeze may vanish from the human mind. Now the laws invite treachery and now they punish it.
