"9. Life imprisonment is the natural and humane check upon one who has
proven his unfitness for freedom by taking life deliberately."
What! it is no longer "much more severe" than the "relic of barbarism?"
In the course of a half dozen lines of petition it has become "humane".
Truly these are lightning changes of character! It would be pleasing to
know just what these worthy Theosophers have the happiness to think that
they think.
"It is the only punishment that receives the consent of conscience."
That is to say, their conscience and that of the convicted assassin.
"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 does; therefore,
incarceration is logical--_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 incredible 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 hook it. One is almost ashamed to dispute with such
intellectual cloudings.
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.
The law of a life for a life does not altogether prevent murder. No law
can altogether prevent any form of crime, nor is it desirable that it
should. Doubtless God could so have created us that our sense of right
and justice could have existed without contemplation of injustice and
wrong, as doubtless he could so have created us that we could have felt
compassion without a knowledge of suffering, but doubtless he did not.
Constituted as we are, we can know good only by contrast with evil. Our
sense of sin is what our virtues feed upon; in the thin air of universal
morality the altar-fires of honor and the beacons of conscience could
not be kept alight A community without crime would be a community
without warm and elevated sentiments--without the sense of justice,
without generosity, without courage, without magnanimity--a community of
small, smug souls, uninteresting to God and uncoveted by the Devil. We
can have too much of crime, no doubt; what the wholesome proportion is
none can say. Just now we are running a good deal to murder, but he who
can gravely attribute that phenomenon, or any part of it, to infliction
of the death penalty, instead of virtual immunity from any penalty at
all, is justly entitled to the innocent satisfaction that comes of being
a simpleton.
The New Woman is against the death penalty, naturally, for she is hot
and hardy in the conviction that whatever is is wrong. She has visited
this world in order to straighten things about a bit, and is in distress
lest the number of things be insufficient to her need. The matter is
important variously; not least so in its relation to the new heaven and
the new earth that are to be the outcome of woman suffrage. There can be
no doubt that the vast majority of women have sentimental objections to
the death penalty that quite outweigh such practical considerations in
its favor as they can be persuaded to comprehend. Aided by the minority
of men afflicted by the same mental malady, they will indubitably effect
its abolition in the first lustrum of their political activity. The
New Woman will scarcely feel the seat of power warm beneath her before
giving to the assassin's "unhand me villain!" the authority of law.
So we shall make again the old experiment, discredited by a thousand
failures, of preventing crime by tenderness to caught criminals. And
the criminal uncaught will treat us to a quality of toughness notably
augmented by the Christian spirit of the régime.