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1 Meliora, A Protest against Capital Punishments 356 (1863)

handle is hein.death/pacpp0001 and id is 1 raw text is: ( 356 ) ART. IV.-A PROTEST AGAINST CAPITAL PUNISH- MENTS. r THE attention of the public has of late been led by a series of wretched events, more than, perhaps, ever at any former time, to the subject of capital punishments. What the effect has been of this on public opinion is as yet uncertain. Very pro- bably the frequency of murders has made many converts to the one side of the question, and the frequency of executions to the other-both by an easily understood moral law tending to coun- teract and neutralize each other. But, in the mean time, we wish not so much to pursue any elaborate argument, or to suggest any original trains of thought, as to record a deliberate protest, along with a few reasons for it, against what is a frequent, a popular, but, in our judgment, a most unjust, cruel, inexpedient, useless, and pernicious practice. That capital punishment is an old law or practice, there can be no question. Knowing the terrors and mysteries connected with death, and the extreme value attached to life, legislators, in every age and country, have included the punishment of death amongst legal penalties. Alike, Solon and Moses, Lycurgus and Con- fucius, have condemned not one, merely, but many crimes, to an extreme penalty, and thus have sought to guard human life and property by the strongest of sanctions. No doubt in this, experience proves that they have all more or less failed. But still we are ready to grant that at the time when their codes were constructed any other arrangement was almost impossible. Legis- lating for barbarous people, the very existence of society required the enactment of barbarous penalties. The great law of Christian love and the great principle of Christian brotherhood had not yet dawned upon the world. And since that law and that principle have been better understood,-i. e., since the commencement of the present century, for then it is generally admitted that a great stride forward in civilization was taken-they have been gradually abolishing the punishment of death, till now it is only inflicted for the crime of murder. The laws of England, like those of Draco, had long been written in blood. When about the middle of the last century Sir William Blackstone wrote his Commentaries, he enumerated no less than one hundred and sixty crimes which were by the English law punishable by death. But now, greatly through the exertions of the benevolent Sir Samuel Romilly, seconded and enlarged after that statesman's death by the late lamented Sir Robert Peel, this number has been gradually, and amid much opposition, reduced. Although several crimes are still, we believe, exposed theoretically, under the Statute Book, to the extreme penalty of the law, that penalty is never extended in practice, as we

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