Principles of Morals and

240/Jeremy Bentham
ture of the task, which such a work will have to achieve: it will at the
same time furnish, not any thing like a satisfactory answer to the ques-
tions mentioned in the text, but a slight and general indication of the
course to be taken for giving them such an answer.
II. What is a law? What the parts of a law? The subject of these
questions it is to be observed, is the logical, the ideal, the intellectual
whole not the physical one: the law, and not the statute. An enquiry,
directed to the latter sort of object, could neither admit of difficulty nor
afford instruction. In this sense whatever is given for law by the person
or persons recognized as possessing the power of making laws, is law.
The Metamorphoses of Ovid, if thus given, would be law. So much as
was embraced by one and the same act of authentication, so much as
received the touch of the sceptre at one stroke, is one law: a whole law,
and nothing more. A statute of George II made to substitute an or in-
stead of an and in a former statute is a complete law; a statute contain-
ing an entire body of laws, perfect in all its parts, would not be more so.
By the word law then, as often as it occurs in the succeeding pages is
meant that ideal object, of which the part, the whole, or the multiple, or
an assemblage of parts, wholes, and multiples mixed together, is exhib-
ited by a statute; not the statute which exhibits them.
III. Every law, when complete, is either of a coercive or an uncoercive
nature.
A coercive law is a command.
An uncoercive, or rather a discoercive, law is the revocation, in
whole or in part, of a coercive law.
IV. What has been termed a declaratory law, sofar as it stands dis-
tinguished from either a coercive or a discoercive law, is not properly
speaking a law. It is not the expression of an act of the will exercised at
the time: it is a mere notification of the existence of a law, either of the
coercive or the discoercive kind, as already subsisting: of the existence
of some document expressive of some act of the will, exercised, not at
the time, but at some former period. If it does any thing more than give
information of this fact, viz., of the prior existence of a law of either the
coercive or the discoercive kind, it ceases pro tanto to be what is meant
by a declaratory law, and assuming either the coercive or the discoercive
quality.
V. Every coercive law creates an offence, that is, converts an act of
some sort, or other into an offence. It is only by so doing that it can
impose obligation, that it can produce coercion.

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Principles of Morals and Legislation/241
VI. A law confining itself to the creation of an offence, and a law
comanding a punishment to be administered in case of the commission
of such an offence, are two distinct laws, not parts (as they seem to have
been generally accounted hitherto) of one and the same law. The acts
they command are altogether different; the persons they are addressed
to are altogether different. Instance, Let no man steal; and, Let the judge
cause whoever is convicted of stealing to be hanged.
They might be styled, the former, a simply imperative law; the other
a  punitory: but the punitory, if it commands the punishment to be in-
flicted, and does not merely permit it, is as truly imperative as the other:
only it is punitory besides, which the other is not.
VII. A law of the discoercive kind, considered in itself, can have no
punitory law belonging to it: to receive the assistance and support of a
punitory in law, it must flrst receive that of a simply imperative or coer-
cive law, and it is to this latter that the punitory law will attach itself,
and not to the discoercive one. Example, discoercive law. The sheriff
has power to hang all such as the judge, proceeding in due course of
law, shall order him to hang. Example of a coercive law, made in sup-
port of the above discoereive one. Let no man hinder the sheriff from
hanging such as the judge, proceeding in due course of law, shall or-
der him to hang. Example of a punitory law, made in support of the
above coercive one. Let the judge cause to be imprisoned whosoever
attempts to hinder the sheriff from hanging one, whom the judge, pro-
ceeding in due course of law, has ordered him to hang.
VIII. But though a simply imperative law, and the punitory law
attached to it, are so far distinct laws, that the former contains nothing
of the latter, and the latter, in its direct tenor, contains nothing of the
former; yet by implication, and that a necessary one, the punitory does
involve and include the import of the simply imperative law to which it
is appended. To say to the judge Cause to be hanged whoever in due
form of law is convicted of stealing, is, though not a direct, yet as intel-
ligible a way of intimating to men in general that they must not steal, as
to say to them directly, Do not steal: and one sees, how much more
likely to be efficacious.
IX. It should seem then, that, wherever a simply imperative law is
to have a punitory one appended to it, the former might be spared alto-
gether: in, which case, saving the exeeption (whieh naturally should
seem not likely to be a frequent one) of a law capable of answering its
purpose without such an appendage, there should be no occasion in the

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