to the innocent satisfaction that comes of being a simpleton.
III
The New Woman is against the death penalty, naturally, for she is hot
and hardy in the conviction that whatever is is wrong. She has visited
this world in order to straighten things about a bit, and is in distress lest
the number of things be insufficient to her need. The matter is
important variously; not least so in its relation to the new heaven and
the new earth that are to be the outcome of woman suffrage. There can
be no doubt that the vast majority of women have sentimental
objections to the death penalty that quite outweigh such practical
considerations in its favor as they can be persuaded to comprehend.
Aided by the minority of men afflicted by the same mental malady,
they will indubitably effect its abolition in the first lustrum of their
political "equality." The New Woman will scarcely feel the seat of
power warm beneath her before giving to the assassin's "unhand me,
villain!" the authority of law. So we shall make again the old
experiment, discredited by a thousand failures, of preventing crime by
tenderness to caught criminals. And the criminal uncaught will treat us
to a quantity and quality of crime notably augmented by the Christian
spirit of the new _régime_.
IV
As to painless execution, 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 today, 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 prisoners 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 law-making 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
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