Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/851

Rh an example. The infliction of such penalties proceeds upon the theory of retaliation, and, for this reason, is improper and vicious. The legitimate province of all laws relating to penalties for crime is punishment simply. Anything that is inflicted beyond this, whether against law, as by mob violence, or by legislation, as in the case of retaliatory punishments, exceeds the legitimate scope of penalties for crime. There may be scriptural precedent to the contrary, but we must not adopt as a divine precedent, applicable to all nations, those rules which were laid down for a particular people, in a remote and barbarous age. Many things that are faithless, treacherous, unnatural and cruel, find a seeming sanction and precedent in the Mosaic law. Punishment, in its proper acceptation, means the protection of society, as represented by the State, against the inroads of the individual upon its welfare, or, as it is called in criminal-law phrase, "the peace of the State." It is only when the encroachments of the individual upon the rights of others amount to a public wrong that they are punishable criminally, and then it is only the wrong to society, and not the sin, that is cognizable by the tribunals.

Looking, then, at punishment in that light—viewing it as designed merely to conserve the public welfare, "the peace, government, and dignity of the State," as it is technically expressed in every formal indictment for crime in Maryland—by what consideration should we be guided in determining the true policy to be pursued in the application of punishments? Surely, not the narrow one of (at all hazards) suppressing the particular crime. Crime can not be stamped out by any heroic methods of treatment. Sin and crime are inevitable conditions incident to our present state of social advancement, just as disease is a factor of our physical being. He would be deemed an unskillful physician who directed all his efforts toward the driving away of a particular malady without regard to the effect of his course of treatment upon the general system of the patient. A like want of skill in statesmanship is exhibited when the legislator proposes such a remedy as that enacted in Maryland for wife-beating, to wit, the whipping-post, without weighing the effect of the introduction of that sort of remedy upon the constitution of the body politic.

The arguments advanced in support of this legislation are as plausible and as apt to impress the popular mind as they arc fallacious and illogical. The crime of the brutal wife-beater affords an excellent topic for declamation and invective, and people of generous, high impulse are very prone to yield their cooler judgment in such matters to specious rhetoric. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the question from a logical stand-point, free from all declamation or sentimentalism, in which the discussions of such questions too frequently abound.

Now, firstly, let it be borne in mind that, in the discussion of a question of punishment for crime, we deal with public interests. Mere satisfaction to the individual upon whom the crime is perpetrated is