Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 02.pdf/73

56 between meum and tuum was a most important matter, must bide world without end, and be respected universally accordingly; that persons must neither kill nor steal (over "the value of a shilling"); that there must be total abstinence, too, from much else likewise more or less morally reprehensible or statutorily inhibited throughout the unfortunate England of Shakspeare, if Englishmen loved life.

A perusal of the memoirs of the Sansons, a visit to the Hotel Cluny, an inspection of the torture-chamber of either the Tower of London or the Castle of Nuremberg, are each capable of throwing a flood of light upon the limitless barbarity of the law in even highly civilized times,—times, in fact, still recent.

And here we are, the nineteenth century fast waning before us; yet is the light about these things scarcely better, despite Menlo Park wizards and electricians generally? Power to take life,—awful act, involving the eternally irreparable,—which society arrogated to itself in dark and beclouded times, it still arrogates to itself, only "upon more humane lines." The small-talk pundit might say, "lines hempen no longer," and smirk hugely, were it a joking matter. Alas! it is too funebrious for any fun,—this pseudo-philanthropical business of rendering man-killing humane. There be, indeed, thoughtful and sober persons enough, who refuse to concede the sufficiency of even an alleged divine origin for so fearful a power, to justify it against the obviously fundamental principles of right which underlie the question,—these principles being each founded in a truth of the inexorable, axiomatic kind, notwithstanding legislation or other pretended higher edict and sanction to the contrary. Are we not sought to be befogged? and is not dust in great handfuls thrown into our simple eyes by the law as it stands no less than by the quasi-philanthropical personages who have had this law tinkered, and changed an ancient and due-pedigreed mode of lawful killing by the strand into killing by electricity, all for humanity's sweet sake?

These personages (alas that they are each so eminently respectable, and all so indubitably sincere about it!) would wantonly rob society of whatever deterring influence may repose in horror-laden "ocular-spectacular" example whenever the law deems it necessary to administer capital punishment Yet such influence alone forms the ground that comes nearest to any apparent vindication of the death-penalty, though eternally short of a justification for it. Metaphorically expressing it, they propose in sober earnest to put a candle-snuffer over the condemned, and hide the slaughter of him from public sight, by having the law take its dread course in the silence and secrecy of a secluded enclosure, where mortal life is pinched out like the flicker of a mean tallow-dip, where the press shall be denied admission and hushed, and where the ghastliest of tragedies, when fully finished, can subserve no good or purpose (if it ever did before) to any sorrowing child of Adam. Such a course is simply assassination; it is wholly a Star-Chamber proceeding. The "removal" of Dr. Cronin, of Chicago, was no baser, no more brutal, cowardly, and idle a transgression. Who is able here to apostrophize the humbug, cruelty, and utter fatuousness of the novel proceeding? Who will not execrate the crazy crab-movement in the boasted progress of things? And we, the sovereign people of the foremost republic of any age (or, at least, some considerable few of us), vaunting ourselves, therefore (among other great things), to be the crown of all civilization, crowing on such a bedizened dung-hill!

The Kemmler investigation is at an end. Referee Becker may report as he will on the issues, both of law and of fact. The person or persons who constitute the court of final review may pass such judgment as they deem meet and fair, yet the momentous principles of ethics—the rights fundamentally involved in the matter—will remain unaltered and unaffected. The