A Cynic Looks at Life

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 of the criminal element with which they had to deal?

I am far from thinking that severity of punishment can have the same restraining effect as probability of some punishment being inflicted; but if mildness of penalty is to be superadded to difficulty of conviction, and both are to be mounted upon laxity in detection, the pile will be complete indeed.  There is a peculiar fitness, perhaps, in the fact that all these pleas for comfortable punishment should be urged at a time when there appears to be a general disposition to inflict no punishment at all.  There are, however, still a few old-fashioned persons who hold it obvious that one who is ambitious to break the laws of his country will not with so light a heart and so airy an indifference incur the peril of a harsh penalty as he will the chance of one more nearly resembling that which he would himself select.