As to painless executions, the simple and practical way to make them
both just and expedient is the adoption by murderers of a system of
painless assassinations. Until this is done there seems to be no
call to renounce the wholesome discomfort of the style of executions
endeared to us by memories and associations of the tenderest character.
There is, I fancy, a shaping notion in the observant 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 philanthropers 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 kill somebody else
instead of himself, in order to receive from the public executioner 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 one and
all, they 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 different world
from the world of to-day, 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 _peine
forte et dure_ of cold-pressing (an infliction which the pen of Hugo
has since made popular—in literature),—in these wicked old days crime
flourished, not because of the law’s severity, but in spite of it. It
is possible that our lawmaking 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 indeed. There is a peculiar fitness, perhaps,
in the fact that all these pleas for comfortable punishment should
be urged at a time when there appears to be a 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 so light a heart and so
airy an indifference incur the peril of a harsh penalty as he will the
chance of one more nearly resembling that which he would himself select.
V
After lying for more than a century dead I was revived, dowered with a
new body, and restored to society. The first thing of interest that I
observed was an enormous building, covering a square mile of ground.
It was surrounded on all sides by a high, strong wall of hewn stone
upon which armed sentinels paced to and fro. In one face of the wall
was a single gate of massive iron, strongly guarded. While admiring the
cyclopean architecture of the “reverend pile” I was accosted by a man
in uniform, evidently the warden, with a cheerful salutation.
“Colonel,” I said, “pray tell me what is this building.”
“This,” said he, “is the new state penitentiary. It is one of twelve,
all alike.”
“You surprise me,” I replied. “Surely the criminal element must have
increased enormously.”
“Yes, indeed,” he assented; “under the Reform _régime_, which began
in your day, crime became so powerful, bold and fierce that arrests
were no longer possible and the prisons then in existence were soon
overcrowded. The state was compelled to erect others of greater
capacity.”
“But, Colonel,” I protested, “if the criminals were too bold and
powerful to be taken into custody, of what use are the prisons? And how
are they crowded?”
He fixed upon me a look that I could not fail to interpret as
expressing a doubt of my sanity. “What!” he said, “is it possible that
the modern penology is unknown to you? Do you suppose we practise the
antiquated and ineffective method of shutting up the rascals? Sir, the
growth of the criminal element has, as I said, compelled the erection
of more and larger prisons. We have enough to hold comfortably all the
honest men and women of the state. Within these protecting walls they
carry on all the necessary vocations of life excepting commerce. That
is necessarily in the hands of the rogues, as before.”
“Venerated representative of Reform,” I exclaimed, wringing his hand
with effusion, “you are Knowledge, you are History, you are the Higher
Education! We must talk further. Come, let us enter this benign
edifice; you shall show me your dominion and instruct me in the rules.
You shall propose me as an inmate.”
I walked rapidly to the gate. When challenged by the sentinel, I turned
to summon my instructor. He was nowhere visible. I turned again to look
at the prison. Nothing was there: desolate and forbidding, as about the
broken statue of Ozymandias,
The lone and level sands stretched far away.