As to painless execution, the simple and practical way to make them both
just and expedient is the adoption by murderers of a system of painless
assassinations. Until this is done there seems to be no call to
renounce the wholesome discomfort of the style of executions endeared to
us by memories and associations of the tenderest character. There is, I
fancy, a shaping notion in the observant mind that the penologists and
their allies have gone about as far as they can safely be permitted to
go in the direction of a softer suasion of the criminal nature toward
good behavior. The modern prison has become a rather more comfortable
habitation than the dangerous classes are accustomed to at home. Modern
prison life has in their eyes something of the charm and glamor of an
ideal existence, like that in the Happy Valley from which Rasselas had
the folly to escape. Whatever advantages to the public may be secured by
abating the rigors of imprisonment and inconveniences incident to
execution, there is this objection: it makes them less deterrent. Let
the penologers and philanthropers have their way and even hanging might
be made so pleasant and withal so interesting a social distinction that
it would deter nobody but the person hanged. Adopt the euthanasian
method of electricity, asphyxia by smothering in rose-leaves, or slow
poisoning with rich food, and the death penalty may come to be regarded
as the object of a noble ambition to the _bon vivant_, and the rising
young suicide may go and kill somebody else instead of himself, in order
to receive from the public executioner a happier dispatch than his own
'prentice hand can assure him.
But the advocates of agreeable pains and penalties tell us that in the
darker ages, when cruel and degrading punishment was the rule, and was
freely inflicted for every light infraction of the law, crime was more
common than it is now; and in this they appear to be right. But one and
all, they overlook a fact equally obvious and vastly significant, that
the intellectual, moral and social condition of the masses was very low.
Crime was more common because ignorance was more common, poverty was
more common, sins of authority, and therefore hatred of authority, were
more common. The world of even a century ago was a different world from
the world of today, and a vastly more uncomfortable one. The popular
adage to the contrary notwithstanding, human nature was not by a long
cut the same then that it is now. In the very ancient time of that early
English king, George III, when women were burned at the stake in public
for various offenses and men were hanged for "coining" and children for
theft, and in the still remoter period (_circa_ 1530), when prisoners
were boiled in several waters, divers sorts of criminals were
disemboweled and some are thought to have undergone the _peine forte et
dure_ of cold-pressing (an infliction which the pen of Hugo has since
made popular--in literature)--in these wicked old days crime flourished,
not because of the law's severity, but in spite of it. It is possible
that our law-making ancestors understood the situation as it then was a
trifle better than we can understand it on the hither side of this gulf
of years, and that they were not the reasonless barbarians that we
think them to have been. And if they were, what must have been the
unreason and barbarity of the criminal element with which they had to
deal?
I am far from thinking that severity of punishment can have the same
restraining effect as probability of some punishment being inflicted;
but if mildness of penalty is to be superadded to difficulty of
conviction, and both are to be mounted upon laxity in detection, the
pile will be complete indeed. There is a peculiar fitness, perhaps, in
the fact that all these pleas for comfortable punishment should be urged
at a time when there appears to be a general disposition to inflict no
punishment at all. There are, however, still a few old-fashioned persons
who hold it obvious that one who is ambitious to break the laws of his
country will not with so light a heart and so airy an indifference incur
the peril of a harsh penalty as he will the chance of one more nearly
resembling that which he would himself select.
V
After lying for more than a century dead I was revived, dowered with a
new body, and restored to society. The first thing of interest that I
observed was an enormous building, covering a square mile of ground. It
was surrounded on all sides by a high, strong wall of hewn stone upon
which armed sentinels paced to and fro. In one face of the wall was a
single gate of massive iron, strongly guarded. While admiring the
Cyclopean architecture of the "reverend pile" I was accosted by a man in
uniform, evidently the warden, with a cheerful salutation.
"Colonel," I said, "pray tell me what is this building."
"This," said he, "is the new state penitentiary. It is one of twelve,
all alike."
"You surprise me," I replied. "Surely the criminal element must have
increased enormously."
"Yes, indeed," he assented; "under the Reform _régime_, which began in
your day, crime became so powerful, bold and fierce that arrests were no
longer possible and the prisons then in existence were soon overcrowded.
The state was compelled to erect others of greater capacity."
"But, Colonel," I protested, "if the criminals were too bold and
powerful to be taken into custody, of what use are the prisons? And how
are they crowded?"
He fixed upon me a look that I could not fail to interpret as expressing
a doubt of my sanity. "What!" he said, "is it possible that the modern
penology is unknown to you? Do you suppose we practice the antiquated
and ineffective method of shutting up the rascals? Sir, the growth of
the criminal element has, as I said, compelled the erection of more and
larger prisons. We have enough to hold comfortably all the honest men
and women of the state. Within these protecting walls they carry on all
the necessary vocations of life excepting commerce. That is necessarily
in the hands of the rogues, as before."
"Venerated representative of Reform," I exclaimed, wringing his hand
with effusion, "you are Knowledge, you are History, you are the Higher
Education! We must talk further. Come, let us enter this benign edifice;
you shall show me your dominion and instruct me in the rules. You shall
propose me as an inmate."
I walked rapidly to the gate. When challenged by the sentinel, I turned
to summon my instructor. He was nowhere visible. I turned again to look
at the prison. Nothing was there: desolate and forbidding, as about the
broken statue of Ozymandias.
The lone and level sands stretched far away.