I
"Down with the gallows!" is a cry not unfamiliar in America. There is
always a movement afoot to make odious the just principle; of "a life
for a life"--to represent it as "a relic of barbarism," "a usurpation of
the divine authority," and the rest of it. The law making murder
punishable by death is as purely a measure of self-defense as is the
display of a pistol to one diligently endeavoring to kill without
provocation. It is in precisely the same sense an admonition, a warning
to abstain from crime. Society says by that law: "If you kill one of us
you die," just as by display of the pistol the individual whose life is
attacked says: "Desist or be shot." To be effective the warning in
either case must be more than an idle threat. Even the most unearthly
reasoner among the anti-hanging unfortunates would hardly expect to
frighten away an assassin who knew the pistol to be unloaded. Of course
these queer illogicians can not be made to understand that their
position commits them to absolute non-resistance to any kind of
aggression; and that is fortunate for the rest of us, for if as
Christians they frankly and consistently took that ground we should be
under the miserable necessity of respecting them.
We have good reason to hold that the horrible prevalence of murder in
this country is due to the fact that we do not execute our laws--that
the death penalty is threatened but not inflicted--that the pistol is
not loaded. In civilized countries where there is enough respect for the
laws to administer them, there is enough to obey them. While man still
has as much of the ancestral brute as his skin can hold without cracking
we shall have thieves and demagogues and anarchists and assassins and
persons with a private system of lexicography who define murder as
disease and hanging as murder, but in all this welter of crime and
stupidity are areas where human life is comparatively secure against the
human hand. It is at least a significant coincidence that in these the
death penalty for murder is fairly well enforced by judges who do not
derive any part of their authority from those for whose restraint and
punishment they hold it. Against the life of one guiltless person the
lives of ten thousand murderers count for nothing; their hanging is a
public good, without reference to the crimes that disclose their
deserts. If we could discover them by other signs than their bloody
deeds they should be hanged anyhow. Unfortunately we must have a death
as evidence. The scientist who will tell us how to recognize the
potential assassin, and persuade us to kill him, will be the greatest
benefactor of his century.
What would these enemies of the gibbet have--these lineal descendants
of the drunken mobs that hooted the hangman at Tyburn Tree; this progeny
of criminals, which has so defiled with the mud of its animosity the
noble office of public executioner that even "in this enlightened age"
he shirks his high duty, entrusting it to a hidden or unnamed
subordinate? If murder is unjust of what importance is it whether its
punishment by death be just or not?--nobody needs to incur it. Men are
not drafted for the death penalty; they volunteer. "Then it is not
deterrent," mutters the gentleman whose rude forefather hooted the
hangman. Well, as to that, the law which is to accomplish more than a
part of its purpose must be awaited with great patience. Every murder
proves that hanging is not altogether deterrent; every hanging, that it
is somewhat deterrent--it deters the person hanged. A man's first murder
is his crime, his second is ours.
The socialists, it seems, believe with Alphonse Karr, in the expediency
of abolishing the death penalty; but apparently they do not hold, with
him, that the assassins should begin. They want the state to begin,
believing that the magnanimous example will effect a change of heart in
those about to murder. This, I take it, is the meaning of their
assertion that death penalties have not the deterring influence that
imprisonment for life carries. In this they obviously err: death deters
at least the person who suffers it--he commits no more murder; whereas
the assassin who is imprisoned for life and immune from further
punishment may with impunity kill his keeper or whomsoever he may be
able to get at. Even as matters now are, incessant vigilance is required
to prevent convicts in prison from murdering their attendants and one
another. How would it be if the "life-termer" were assured against any
additional inconvenience for braining a guard occasionally, or
strangling a chaplain now and then? A penitentiary may be described as a
place of punishment and reward; and under the system proposed, the
difference in desirableness between a sentence and an appointment would
be virtually effaced. To overcome this objection a life sentence would
have to mean solitary confinement, and that means insanity. Is that what
these gentlemen propose to substitute for death?
The death penalty, say these amiables and futilitarians, creates
blood-thirstiness in the unthinking masses and defeats its own ends--is
itself a cause of murder, not a check. These gentlemen are themselves of
"the unthinking masses"--they do not know how to think. Let them try to
trace and lucidly expound the chain of motives lying between the
knowledge that a murderer has been hanged and the wish to commit a
murder. How, precisely, does the one beget the other? By what unearthly
process of reasoning does a man turning away from the gallows persuade
himself that it is expedient to incur the danger of hanging? Let us have
pointed out to us the several steps in that remarkable mental progress.
Obviously, the thing is absurd; one might as reasonably say that
contemplation of a pitted face will make a man wish to go and catch
smallpox, or the spectacle of an amputated limb on the scrap-heap of a
hospital tempt him to cut off his arm or renounce his leg.
"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," say the opponents of the
death penalty, "is not justice; it is revenge and unworthy of a
Christian civilization." It is exact justice: nobody can think of
anything more accurately just than such punishments would be, whatever
the motive in awarding them. Unfortunately such a system is not
practicable, but he who denies its justice must deny also the justice of
a bushel of corn for a bushel of corn, a dollar for a dollar, service
for service. We can not undertake by such clumsy means as laws and
courts to do to the criminal exactly what he has done to his victim,
but to demand a life for a life is simple, practicable, expedient and
(therefore) right.
"Taking the life of a murderer does not restore the life he took,
therefore it is a most illogical punishment. Two wrongs do not make a
right."
Here's richness! Hanging an assassin is illogical because it does not
restore the life of his victim; incarceration is logical; therefore,
incarceration does--_quod, erat demonstrandum._
Two wrongs certainly do not make a right, but the veritable thing in
dispute is whether taking the life of a life-taker is a wrong. So naked
and unashamed an example of _petitio principii_ would disgrace a debater
in a pinafore. And these wonder-mongers have the effrontery to babble of
"logic"! Why, if one of them were to meet a syllogism in a lonely road
he would run away in a hundred and fifty directions as hard as ever he
could hoof it. One is almost ashamed to dispute with such intellectual
cloutlings.
Whatever an individual may rightly do to protect himself society may
rightly do to protect him, for he is a part of itself. If he may rightly
take life in defending himself society may rightly take life in
defending him. If society may rightly take life in defending him it may
rightly threaten to take it. Having rightly and mercifully threatened to
take it, it not only rightly may take it, but expediently must.