Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/852

832 not to be considered, nor is the matter of the welfare of the offender to control our action in dealing with crime. Both interests must yield to that of the State, which is the injured party. The errors most frequently committed in forming a judgment as to the punishment due for any crime arise, on the one hand, from an excess of hostile feeling toward the offender, which obscures our view of the real end to be accomplished by his punishment, and, on the other hand, the opposite bent of letting sympathy and excess of kindly feeling shut out from our view the demands of public justice.

In traveling through the dark mazes of human frailty and crime, it would be difficult to find an object more seemingly devoid of every nobler human instinct than the cruel wife-beater, for whose offense a recent Maryland statute has revived the lash and whipping-post; unless, indeed, it be that loathsome specimen from the list of criminals, in whom humanity seems to have sunk to its lowest ebb, the cruel child-beater. But, let us proceed to answer the real question which the punishment of the wife-beater raises for solution. Does society, whose laws have been broken and must be vindicated, upon the whole, gain or does it lose by the method of punishment under discussion? Granted that the whipping-post will stamp out the crime of wife-beating in our midst, does the gain justify the price?

To illustrate my meaning clearly, I lay down the following proposition, which will not be gainsaid by any one versed in matters of social science. If, in the case of any given offense, no punishment to be meted out to the offender could be devised that would be effective in deterring others from committing the like offense, then the State could not rightfully punish at all, however heinous the offense. Why? Because, in the language of an eminent and conservative writer upon this subject, "the end of punishment is not by way of atonement or expiation of the crime committed, for that must be left to the just determination of a Supreme Being, but as a precaution against future offenses." Unless the punishment can be made effective for the conservation of the peace of the State, we are not justified in inflicting it. From this the further proposition follows, that the State may inflict no further or greater punishment than is absolutely necessary to attain that end, the protection of society. Do these interests require and are they advanced by the infliction of lashes upon wife-beaters?

It may safely be stated that a husband, before he beats his wife to the brutal extent that is contemplated by the statute authorizing lashes, has already sufficiently shown his evil character to warn his wife that he is no fit husband for her to dwell with and enable her to procure the separation to which the law entitles her. If this were done, all occasion for any such crime would be avoided, and the wife would be protected, and society protected. But, must a wife, simply because her husband is a brute, seek a divorce, and thus lose home and husband, and, moreover, deprive her children of their home and