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 hook 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.