The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce | Page 8

Americologists think belongs to the
beginning of the twentieth century. Certainly it could not have been
written later than the middle of it, for at that time woman had been
definitely released from any responsibility to any law but that of her
own will. The essay is an argument against even such imperfect
exemption as she had in its author's time.
"It has been urged," the writer says, "that women, being less rational
and more emotional than men, should not be held accountable in the
same degree. To this it may be answered that punishment for crime is
not intended to be retaliatory, but admonitory and deterrent. It is,
therefore, peculiarly necessary to those not easily reached by other
forms of warning and dissuasion. Control of the wayward is not to be
sought in reduction of restraints, but in their multiplication. One who
cannot be curbed by reason may be curbed by fear, a familiar truth
which lies at the foundation of all penological systems. The argument
for exemption of women is equally cogent for exemption of habitual
criminals, for they too are abnormally inaccessible to reason,
abnormally disposed to obedience to the suasion of their unregulated
impulses and passions. To free them from the restraints of the fear of

punishment would be a bold innovation which has as yet found no
respectable proponent outside their own class.
"Very recently this dangerous enlargement of the meaning of the phrase
'emancipation of woman' has been fortified with a strange advocacy by
the female 'champions of their sex.' Their argument runs this way: 'We
are denied a voice in the making of the laws relating to infliction of the
death penalty; it is unjust to hold us to an accountability to which we
have not assented.' Of course this argument is as broad as the entire
body of law; it amounts to nothing less than a demand for general
immunity from all laws, for to none of them has woman's assent been
asked or given. But let us consider this amazing claim with reference
only to the proposal in the service and promotion of which it is now
urged: exemption of women from the death penalty for murder. In the
last analysis it is seen to be a simple demand for compensation. It says:
'You owe us a solatium. Since you deny us the right to vote, you should
give us the right to assassinate. We do not appraise it at so high a
valuation as the other franchise, but we do value it.'
"Apparently they do: without legal, but with virtual, immunity from
punishment, the women of this country take an average of one thousand
lives annually, nine in ten being the lives of men. Juries of men, incited
and sustained by public opinion, have actually deprived every adult
male American of the right to live. If the death of any man is desired by
any woman for any reason he is without protection. She has only to kill
him and say that he wronged or insulted her. Certain almost incredible
recent instances prove that no woman is too base for immunity, no
crime against life sufficiently rich in all the elements of depravity to
compel a conviction of the assassin, or, if she is convicted and
sentenced, her punishment by the public executioner."
In this interesting fragment, quoted by Bogul in his "History of an
Extinct Civilization," we learn something of the shame and peril of
American citizenship under institutions which, not having run their
foreordained course to the unhappy end, were still in some degree
supportable. What these institutions became afterward is a familiar
story. It is true that the law of trial by jury was repealed. It had broken
down, but not until it had sapped the whole nation's respect for all law,
for all forms of authority, for order and private virtues. The people
whose rude forefathers in another land it had served roughly to protect

against their tyrants, it had lamentably failed to protect against
themselves, and when in madness they swept it away, it was not as one
renouncing an error, but as one impatient of the truth which the error is
still believed to contain. They flung it away, not as an ineffectual
restraint, but as a restraint; not because it was no longer an instrument
of justice for the determination of truth, but because they feared that it
might again become such. In brief, trial by jury was abolished only
when it had provoked anarchy.
Before turning to another phase of this ancient civilization I cannot
forbear to relate, after the learned and ingenious Gunkux, the only
known instance of a public irony expressing itself in the sculptor's
noble art. In the ancient city of Hohokus once stood a monument of
colossal size and impressive