Since property and personality have legal recognition and validity in civil society, crime is no longer merely the violation of a subjectively infinite [right], but of the universal thing, which has an existence firm and strong in itself. There thus enters in the point of view of the danger that the act poses to society, whereby, on the one hand, the magnitude of the crime is increased; but, on the other hand, the power of society, having become secure of itself, lowers the external importance of the violation, and thus brings about a greater leniency in its punishment.

That, in one member of society, all the others are violated does not change the nature of the crime according to its concept, but rather according to the side of external existence, of the violation, which now affects the representation and the consciousness of civil society, and not only the existence of the one directly violated. In the heroic ages (see the tragedies of the ancients), citizens do not regard themselves as violated by the crimes that the members of royal houses commit against one another. — Since crime, in itself an infinite violation, must, as an existence, be assessed according to qualitative and quantitative differences (§ 96), a difference now essentially determined as representation and consciousness of the validity of the laws, the danger to civil society is a determination of its magnitude, or also one of its qualitative determinations. — This quality, or magnitude, however, is variable according to the condition of civil society, and in this lies the justification for punishing a theft of a few sous, or of a turnip, with death, in one condition, and a theft amounting to a hundred times, or more, of such values, with a mild punishment, in another. The point of view of danger to civil society, while it seems to aggravate crimes, is rather what has chiefly diminished their punishment. A penal code therefore belongs, chiefly, to its own time, and to the condition of civil society within that time.