Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/854

834 image. The strictest or most intolerant (put it as you choose) creeds give a man until after death without repentance before consigning him to perdition everlasting. Here, however, the State shuts out a man from repentance, treats him as a brute who has forfeited all right to consideration as a man. For, when we inflict ignominy, we do all this. In doing this, in disgracing a being created in the image of God, we simply insult the great Being who has implanted his image and spirit in all of us. However far we may stray from grace, we can not, by our acts, divest ourselves of our human nature or forfeit our claim to consideration as human beings.

The advocates of cruel punishments ask, How can you cope with brutality and brutal men unless you treat such men after their own fashion? You must meet brutality with brutality, is their plea; you must adopt strong remedies for evils that will not yield to mild measures. It might be answered that such punishments do not fulfill their end, and the history of all times and the testimony of the most enlightened students of such questions in all countries might be appealed to in confirmation. When, under English law, two hundred different actions, "many of them," according to a great writer on criminal jurisprudence, "not deserving the name of offenses," were punishable by death, and offenders were whipped, scourged, pilloried, hanged, quartered and sometimes roasted alive, crime was not less frequent, nor were the laws violated with less ado than to-day. The very circumstance that whipping and similar punishments have had their day of trial and were abolished by a generation that witnessed the workings of the system in all its full-blown beauty, demonstrates its unsatisfactory character to the minds of those best acquainted with it. But I go further. Crime is inherent in our defective civilization, and you can't hurry up the march of civilization in any such patent way as lashing men. Criminal law is not a panacea to soften the human heart. Civilization has reached a certain height or state of development, and sin and crime are concomitants of that state. While crime must be punished, it can not be wiped out. Human nature is so constituted that men revolt at the deliberate infliction of pain upon a fellow-being, more so, indeed, than at any violence or brutality committed by the offender in the heat of passion. Any punishment that shocks the moral sense of a community, as all cruel punishments are calculated to do, falls short of its mark and fails signally to produce the general satisfaction always arising from the administration of wise punishments. Wife-boating is the outcome of a state of society that produces numerous evils of equal degree of which the general public, not acquainted with reformatory work among criminals, are entirely ignorant. Brutal as the offense is, brutality will not be suppressed, civilization will not be advanced one shade nor society benefited or protected by resort to retaliatory punishments. That kind of proceeding always defeats its own object.