A Cynic Looks at Life

“Down with the gallows!” is a cry not unfamiliar in America.  There is always a movement afoot to make odious the just principle; of “a life for a life”—­to represent it as “a relic of barbarism,” “a usurpation of the divine authority,” and the rest of it.  The law making murder punishable by death is as purely a measure of self-defense as is the display of a pistol to one diligently endeavoring to kill without provocation.  It is in precisely the same sense an admonition, a warning to abstain from crime.  Society says by that law:  “If you kill one of us you die,” just as by display of the pistol the individual whose life is attacked says:  “Desist or be shot.”  To be effective the warning in either case must be more than an idle threat.  Even the most unearthly reasoner among the anti-hanging unfortunates would hardly expect to frighten away an assassin who knew the pistol to be unloaded.  Of course these queer illogicians can not be made to understand that their position commits them to absolute non-resistance to any kind of aggression; and that is fortunate for the rest of us, for if as Christians they frankly and consistently took that ground we should be under the miserable necessity of respecting them.

We have good reason to hold that the horrible prevalence of murder in this country is due to the fact that we do not execute our laws—­that the death penalty is threatened but not inflicted—­that the pistol is not loaded.  In civilized countries where there is enough respect for the laws to administer them, there is enough to obey them.  While man still has as much of the ancestral brute as his skin can hold without cracking we shall have thieves and demagogues and anarchists and assassins and persons with a private system of lexicography who define murder as disease and hanging as murder, but in all this welter of crime and stupidity are areas where human life is comparatively secure against the human hand.  It is at least a significant coincidence that in these the death penalty for murder is fairly well enforced by judges who do not derive any part of their authority from those for whose restraint and punishment they hold it.  Against the life of one guiltless person the lives of ten thousand murderers count for nothing; their hanging is a public good, without reference to the crimes that disclose their deserts.  If we could discover them by other signs than their bloody deeds they should be hanged anyhow.  Unfortunately we must have a death as evidence.  The scientist who will tell us how to recognize the potential assassin, and persuade us to kill him, will be the greatest benefactor of his century.

What would these enemies of the gibbet have—­these lineal descendants of the drunken mobs that hooted the hangman at Tyburn Tree; this progeny of criminals, which has so defiled with the mud of its animosity the noble office of public, executioner that even “in this enlightened age” he shirks his high duty, entrusting it to a hidden or unnamed subordinate?  If murder is unjust of what importance is it whether its punishment by death be just or not?—­nobody needs to incur it.  Men are not drafted for the death penalty; they volunteer.  “Then it is not deterrent,” mutters the gentleman whose rude forefather hooted the hangman.  Well, as to that, the law which is to accomplish more than a part of its purpose must be awaited with great patience.  Every murder proves that hanging is not altogether deterrent; every hanging, that it is somewhat deterrent—­it deters the person hanged.  A man’s first murder is his crime, his second is ours.

The socialists, it seems, believe with Alphonse Karr, in the expediency of abolishing the death penalty; but apparently they do not hold, with him, that the assassins should begin.  They want the state to begin, believing that the magnanimous example will effect a change of heart in those about to murder.  This, I take it, is the meaning of their assertion that death penalties have not the deterring influence that imprisonment for life carries.  In this they obviously err:  death deters at least the person who suffers it—­he commits no more murder; whereas the assassin who is imprisoned for life and immune from further punishment may with impunity kill his keeper or whomsoever he may be able to get at.  Even as matters now are, incessant vigilance is required to prevent convicts in prison from murdering their attendants and one another.  How would it be if the “life-termer” were assured against any additional inconvenience for braining a guard 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.