1821. April 6.

First Lines.

Hence it is that, in the field of law, command occupied a much greater extent than

is occupied by invitation. Between the idea of command, and the idea of eventual

punishment, the connection is inseparable. Thus it is that the character and form of

penality are given to the great /principal/ mass of those arrangements /the directive

rules/ by which the distribution of benefits, as well as that of burthens, is

effected. The matter of the Civil Code is, in its form, little else but a sort of

opposition of the terms employed in the commands delivered by the penal code.

Thus to give effect to the distribution made of property against the several acts by

which it is invaded - usurpation for example, or theft, or endamagement, the law must

afford the means of knowing what is each amn's property, and, for this purpose,

employ some such word as titles to denote the several effeicient causes of it. But so

/multiplied/ long every where is the list of the different sorts of titles, and so

unavoidably complicated and voluminous the description of the modes in which they may

be acquired and lost, that to insert all this matter of detail in the body of the

penal code would give an altogether disproportionate bulk to the matter of the

different sections which necessarily belong to it, and in particular the several

sections in and by which the several offences that have been distinguished and

created /acts which have been distinguished and erected/ into offences have been

described. Hence, from the several passages in which, in a penal code, any such word

as title occurs, reference will be made to the division headed with some such word as

title in the Civil Code. So again of the offences enumerated and defined in the penal

Code, non-performance of contract must necessarily be one. But as of services the

variety is infinite, so of services to the rendering of which a man may seek to

oblige himself by contract the variety is great: correspondently great on the other

hand is the variety of cases in which, notwithstanding the entrance made into tis or

that contract, it is not fit that the sanction of the law should be employed in

enforcing the performance of it.

It