As to painless executions, the simple and practical way to make them
both just and popular is the adoption by murderers of a system of
painless assassinations. Until this is done there seems to be no hope
that the people will renounce the wholesome discomfort of the style
of executions endeared to them by memories and associations of the
tenderest character. There is also, I fancy, a shaping notion in the
public 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
philanthrope, 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 murder somebody else instead of himself in order to
receive 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 they one
and all 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 quite 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
poisoners were boiled in several waters, divers sorts of criminals were
disemboweled and some are thought to have undergone _the pêne forte et
dure_ of cold-pressing (an infliction which the pen of Hugo has since
made popular--in literature)--in these wicked old days it is possible
that crime flourished, not because of the law's severity, but in spite
of it. It is possible that our respected and respectable 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" with a vengeance. There is a peculiar fitness,
perhaps, in the fact that all these ideas for comfortable punishment
should be urged at a time when there appears to be a tolerably 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 as light a heart and as
airy an indifference incur the peril of a harsh penalty as he will the
chance of one more nearly resembling that which he would select for
himself.