This is an age of mercy to the merciless. The good Scriptural code, “An
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” has fallen into the sere and
yellow leaf: it is a creed outworn. We have replaced it with a regime
of “reformation,” a penology of persuasion. In our own country this
sign and consequence of moral degeneration, this power and prevalence
of the mollycoddle, are especially marked. We no longer kill our
assassins; as a rule, the only disadvantages they suffer for killing us
are those incident to detention for acquittal, with a little preaching
to remind them of their mortality. Wherefore our homicide list is about
twice annually that of the battle of Gettysburg.
The American prison of to-day is carefully outfitted with the comforts
of home. Those who succeed in breaking into it find themselves
distinctly advantaged in point of housing, and are clothed and fed
better than they ever were before, or will be elsewhere. Light
employment, gentle exercise, cleanliness, and sound sleep reward them,
and when expelled their one ambition is to go back. The “reformation”
consists in lifting them to a higher plane of criminality: the man who
enters as a stupid thief is graduated a competent forger, and comes
back (if he can) with an augmented self-respect and an ambition to kill
the warden. Some of us old fogies think that a prison was best worth
its price to the community when it was a place that a rascal would
rather die out of than get into; but we are _voces in deserto_ and
in the ramp and roar of the new penology altogether unheard.
These remarks are suggested by something in France. In that half-sister
republic the guillotine, though still a lawful dissuader from the
error of assassination, is not at the time of writing in actual use.
Murderers are still sentenced to it, but always the sentence is
commuted to imprisonment during life or good behavior. Coincidently
with the decline of the guillotine there is a notable rise in the rate
of assassination. Somebody having had the sagacity to suggest the
possibility of something more than an accidental relation between the
two phenomena, it occurred to a Parisian editor to collect “views” as
to the expediency of again bringing knife and neck together in the
good old way. He got views of all sorts of kinds, naturally, and knows
almost as much about public opinion as he did before. It is interesting
to note that the literary class is nearly a unit against the
chopping-block, as was to be expected: persons who work with the head
naturally set a high value upon it—an over-appraisement in their own
case, for their heads are somewhat impaired by their habit of housing
their hearts in them. There was an honorable minority: Mistral, the
Provençal poet, who pointed out (in verse) that a people too squeamish
to endure the shedding of criminal blood has taken a long step in the
downward path leading to feebleness.
Wherefore I say: Bravo, Mistral! You have done something to prove that
not all poets are persons of criminal instincts.