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
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 mercy, without
magnanimity—a community of small, smug souls, uninteresting to God and
uncoveted by the Devil. We can have, and do 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 to virtual immunity from any penalty at all, is justly
entitled to the innocent satisfaction that comes of being a simpleton.