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1. The sovereign civil authority has a twofold right over the Citizens’ lives: a direct right in the suppression of crime, and an indirect right in the defence of the State.
2. Force on the part of an external enemy has often to be met by force; or we may need to use violence in claiming our right. In either case the sovereign authority may compel the Citizens to perform this kind of service, where it is not a question of deliberately sending them to death but only of exposing them to the danger of death. The sovereign authority has the duty to give them training and preparation to conduct themselves with vigour and skill in such dangers. No Citizen through fear of this danger may render himself unfit for military service. Once inducted, he will in no circumstances desert his post through fear but will fight rather to the last breath, unless he believes it to be the will of his Commander that he should save his life rather than hold his position, or that the position is less important to the State than the lives of the Citizens involved.
3. Executing its right directly the sovereign power may take away Citizens’ lives for atrocious crimes and as a punishment (though punishment also falls upon a man's other possessions). At this point a few general explanatory remarks on the nature of punishment are necessary.
4. A punishment is an evil one suffers, inflicted in return for an evil one has done; in other words, some painful evil imposed by authority as a means of coercion in view of a past offence.
For although punishment often takes the form of action, yet these actions are designed to be laborious and painful to die doer and so to inflict on him a kind of suffering.
Punishment is to be inflicted on men against their will. Otherwise it would not achieve its goal, which is to deter men from wrongdoing by its harshness. Nothing a man gladly accepts has this effect.
Evils inflicted in war or in self-defence in fighting are not punishments, because they are not by authority.
Nor is what one suffers when wronged a punishment, because it is not inflicted in view of a past offence.
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