A Cynic Looks at Life | Page 8

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 hoof 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.
II
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 crime, no doubt; what the wholesome proportion is none can tell.
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