DOES it do a man any good to hang him? Does it do us any good to hang
him? Is any human being in the wide world edified or bettered when a man
is hanged? Is it any _use_ hanging men?
That it is unjust to hang a man we have seen. But is it any use?
There is a certain school of moralists who are angered and alarmed
by the mere suggestion that men should cease to blame and punish each
other. They protest that virtue would die out and morality become a
mockery if we ceased to scold, and whip, and execute each other. They
seem to believe that injustice and ferocity are the best exemplars of
justice and human kindness.
Dr. Aked, minister of Pembroke Chapel, Liverpool, declaiming against
what he called "this preposterous notion of moral irresponsibility,"
declared that "it is the doctrine of every coward, of every cur, of
every thief who ever pilfered from his master's till, of every seducer
and traitor the world has seen." I whisper the name of Torquemada, and
pass on.
Dr. Aked, supposing, for the sake of illustration, that he who has been
a bad man, said:
If, in the mercy of God, the day comes when I see myself as I am, when
there is no more shuffling, when to myself Myself is compelled, even to
the teeth and forehead of my faults, to give in evidence--if such a
day comes, no juggling with words, _no nonsense about not knowing any
better_ or being driven by education upon organisation, by environment
acting on heredity, will serve to conceal from my soul the hideous view
of its own guilt.
And yet Dr. Aked is a minister of the Christian religion, and a
professed follower of Christ, who said of his murderers, "_Father
forgive them, for they know not what they do_."
I might imitate Dr. Aked, and denounce the idea that punishment makes
men virtuous and docile as the idea of every tyrant, of every religious
persecutor, of every wife-beater, of every martinet, of every bully and
brute the world has ever seen. But I prefer to look calmly and sensibly
at the evidence.
That mighty moral ruler, King Henry VIII., during his reign did,
according to the author of _Elizabethan England_, hang up seventy-two
thousand thieves, rogues, and vagabonds.
Now, Sir Thomas More, who was one of the finest men England ever bred,
and was Lord High Chancellor under Henry VIII., has put it upon record,
in his great and noble work, _Utopia_, that these severe punishments
were not only unjust, but ineffectual.