<P> Beccaria also argued against torture, believing it was cruel and unnecessary . </P> <P> The book's serious message is put across in a clear and animated style, based in particular upon a deep sense of humanity and of urgency at unjust suffering . This humane sentiment is what makes Beccaria appeal for rationality in the laws . </P> <P> Suicide is a crime which seems not to admit of punishment, properly speaking; for it cannot be inflicted but on the innocent, or upon an insensible dead body . In the first case, it is unjust and tyrannical, for political liberty supposes all punishments entirely personal; in the second, it has the same effect, by way of example, as the scourging a statue . Mankind love life too well; the objects that surround them, the seducing phantom of pleasure, and hope, that sweetest error of mortals, which makes men swallow such large draughts of evil, mingled with a very few drops of good, allure them too strongly, to apprehend that this crime will ever be common from its unavoidable impunity . The laws are obeyed through fear of punishment, but death destroys all sensibility . What motive then can restrain the desperate hand of suicide?...But, to return:--If it be demonstrated that the laws which imprison men in their own country are vain and unjust, it will be equally true of those which punish suicide; for that can only be punished after death, which is in the power of God alone; but it is no crime with regard to man, because the punishment falls on an innocent family . If it be objected, that the consideration of such a punishment may prevent the crime, I answer, that he who can calmly renounce the pleasure of existence, who is so weary of life as to brave the idea of eternal misery, will never be influenced by the more distant and less powerful considerations of family and children . </P> <P> Within eighteen months, the book passed through six editions . It was translated into French in 1766 and published with an anonymous commentary by Voltaire . An English translation appeared in 1767, and it was translated into several other languages . The book was read by all the luminaries of the day, including, in the United States, by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson . </P>

Why did many disagree with the initial treatise entitled on crime and punishments