A Cynic Looks at Life

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 to the innocent satisfaction that comes of being a simpleton.