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The Death Penalty
by
As to “hopeless captivity,” though, there is no such thing. In legislation, today can not bind tomorrow. By an act of the Legislature–even by a constitutional prohibition, we may do away with the pardoning power; but laws can be repealed, constitutions amended.
The public has a short memory, signatures to petitions in the line of mercy are had for the asking, and tender-hearted Governors are familiar afflictions. We have life sentences already, and sometimes they are served to the end–if the end comes soon enough! but the average length of “life imprisonment” is, I am told, a little more than seven years. Hope springs eternal in the human beast, and matters simply can not be so arranged that in entering the penitentiary he will “leave hope behind.” Hopeless captivity is a dream.
I quote again:
“9. Life imprisonment is the natural and humane check upon one who has proven his unfitness for freedom by taking life deliberately.”
What! it is no longer “much more severe” than the “relic of barbarism?” In the course of a half dozen lines of petition it has become “humane”. Truly these are lightning changes of character! It would be pleasing to know just what these worthy Theosophers have the happiness to think that they think.
“It is the only punishment that receives the consent of conscience.”
That is to say, their conscience and that of the convicted assassin.
“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 does; therefore, incarceration is logical–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 incredible 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 cloudings.
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.
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 doubtless 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 magnanimity–a community of small, smug souls, uninteresting to God and uncoveted by the Devil. We can 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 virtual immunity from any penalty at all, is justly entitled to the innocent satisfaction that comes of being a simpleton.