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.
Pages:
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41