Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/712

 6gS THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

recipient of countless tokens of a maudlin sentimentality ; and tender-hearted people with the best intentions give aid and countenance to all sorts of devices to defeat the decrees of the courts.

All these things make it difficult to carry out the intention of the law that the murderer shall be executed ; and as a result the risk of death in 1898, and for a number of years previously, was less for the murderer than it is for our mothers in bringing children into the world ; for, according to Mulhall, I y 2 per cent, of all mothers die sooner or 'later in childbirth. Is it not a striking commentary on our civilization that the brutal murderer in driving life out of the world is subjected to less risk of death than the mother in bringing life into it ? Society, the state, continues because our mothers are willing to run that risk. Do we regard murderers of more importance than mothers ?

The almost certain ultimate escape of the murderer, when tried according to the forms of the law, is the chief thought in the mind of the mob when it sweeps aside the established forms of law and order. It justifies its action on the ground that its execution of the criminal avoids both the risk of escape and the piling up of the costs of an extended trial or trials. From the mob's point of view the state has everything to gain and nothing to lose by lynching ; for, after all the time and trouble the state may take, the punishment that it inflicts is the same as that which is ever ready in the hands of the mob. The mob sees no differ- ence between the two ; and thus it happens that in a civilized state there is a resort to the methods of savage justice, because the state does not provide a punishment that fits the crime. Mob law is a menace to the life of the state, and therefore to the individual and his property; and where the growth of mob violence is unchecked the result is social disintegration, anarchy in its worst sense, and, finally, the extermination of civiliza- tion, leaving a country inhabited by a few scattered savages.

Let us now briefly consider the nature of punishment. Pun- ishment is a consequence of the violation of law, whatever may be the nature of the law spiritual, physical, human. The fun- damental idea of law involves the idea of punishment ; for that