Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/142

 *tice, and always they sigh and shake their heads, beholding in those events only a supreme folly and a supreme cruelty.

All the executions, all the imprisonments of the past are seen to have been mistakes made by savages; there is not one for which to-day a word is uttered in excuse. All the Golgothas of the world have become Calvaries, where men go in pity and in tears in the hope that their regret may somehow work a retroactive expiation of the guilt of their cruel ancestors—and they rise from their knees and go forth and acquiesce in brutalities that are to-day different only in the slightest of degrees from those they bemoan.

And so all the other executions of death sentences, on subjects less distinguished, with no glimmer of the halo of romance, no meed of martyrdom to illumine them, are seen to have been huge and grotesque mistakes of a humanity that at times gives itself over to the elemental savage lust of the blood of its fellows.

I do not say, of course, that there was any similarity between the offenses of those whom Jones and I were concerned about in those days and those striking figures who illustrate the history of the world and mark the slow spiral path of the progress of mankind; these were the commonest of common criminals, poor, mistaken, misshapen beings, somehow marred in the making.

It was my lot to defend a number of those who had committed murders, some of them murders so