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]; for a more
serious offense the criminal might have his bones broken and then be
laid on his back on a cart-wheel, to die in agony while crowds looked
on and jeered. In a book entitled _Crimes and Punishments_ (1764),
an Italian marquis of the name of Beccaria (1738-1794) held that such
punishments were not only brutal and barbarous, but did not serve to
prevent crimes as effectually as milder sentences, promptly and surely
administered. Beccaria's ideas are the basis of our modern laws,
although the death penalty still lingers in a few cases.
[Sidenote: Political Economy: the Physiocrats]
In yet another sphere--that of economics--philosophers were examining
the old order of things, and asking, as ever, "Is it reasonable?" As we
have repeatedly observed, most governments had long followed the
mercantilist plan more or less consistently. But in the eighteenth
century, Francois Quesnay, a bourgeois physician at the court of Louis
XV, announced to his friends that mercantilism was all wrong.


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