LETTER IX.
Dear Charles,—You are a very modest man in offering
me a recipe for a multum in parvo letter, as if my consilii
medicina might have been condensed, and so saved double
postage. Why, sir, that expense and the breadth of the
plaister, being thus spread over two sheets, will of themselves
effect your cure: and I had an eye to that when the
blister was sent.
But what a blister of both sorts does that sentence in
your last demand?—that I “obstinately refuse to join the
anti-gallows society!” And, does your reverence really
believe, I have no good reasons for withholding my name
and influence, from the “Murderers' and Assassins' Friends
Society?” Have you joined, Charles, and are you sincere
in wondering at me? The mania has invaded your order, I
see, judging from the smart sprinkle of reverends prefixed to
the names of the officers; and all the grand rascals with
black hearts and bloody hands are soon to have “the benefit
of clergy.”
You are right enough in supposing that I have not read
all the “papers and pamphlets;” but not quite so near the
mark, in thinking the perusal must of necessity change my
opinions. Wise men do, indeed, change their opinions—
but wise men, I presume, do sometimes adhere to their old
friends: and to the latter class we belong. Somehow being
fully confident that common sense, common humanity, natural
instinct, the sense of justice, the good of society, and an
old fashioned book called the Bible, are all in favor of the
death penalty, my logic infers that the contrary opinion is
trickery or error. I stand and say come to me; for I cannot
come to you. Not that I am “unwilling to have my
opinion overthrown;” but, that if my foothold be not now
on rock, it never can be: and so I am not willing to waste
time with “the unanswerable arguments.”
Think not, Charles, that quackery is confined to philosophy
and medicine; it is found in morals, and education, and
religion. And a distinct mark of humbug is the vox populi,
in manifest opposition to the vox Dei. In many moral questions
the agitator excites popular clamor in order to conceal
his false principles, to promote his selfish ends, and even
to cover his hostility to revealed truth.
Majority is his logic;
and with that he votes in his quackery.
And pray, reverend sir, in what consist the wondrous
moral excellence and refinement of our age over all ages
past and future? Why are we too good and elegant to
have the gallows? Granting all that is claimed for our
superiority in such matters, does supreme excellence in
fine arts, poetry, music, painting, statuary, dancing, dressing,—for
these two and other similar things are reduced
to rules and taught and practised as arts—does supreme
excellence here seem inconsistent with a bad heart, with
bad morals, or with open irreligion and even atheistical
thoughts and practices?
Is the worldly-mindedness generated, and kept ever at
fever-heat, by an endless round of amusement and refreshment—concert
rooms—operas—play-houses—museums—
bowling greens—and oyster cellars, where they hang up indecent
paintings, and retail “thunder and light!” by the gill,
in little glass goblets—and all the et ceteras of “Five Points,”
both vulgar and polite—is all this, and the like, proof of
transcendent moral excellence and extreme sensitiveness?
And this refinement is shocked by the gallows! And yet,
Charles, does such refinement never open a plain way to
the gallows? Some eyes are keen enough to discern,
amidst all the flowers and elegence of such a society, the
hideous forms of vindictive malice and revengeful hate, and
brutal lust, and all-grasping avarice, and godless idolatry;
and this, though all are bowing with blandest courtesy, and
moving with matchless grace, and smiling with witching
faces and speaking honied words. And where there are
these, there will even be murder!
True, this society will not call the fiend by his right
name, and they will sanction his deeds and palliate his crimes;
yea, they will so laud his honor, and his bravery, and his
manly spirit, and so soften his rage into a morbid and unfortunate
state of “insane affections,” and they will so represent
his provocations, and the superhuman force of the temptation
and the potency of the circumstances, that the world
shall say, “Alas, poor wretch! let him not die for that!—
how could he help it?” And then the fashionable and the
rectified humanity of the times will exclaim, with unutterable
scorn in word and action, and with ineffable self-complacency
for its own virtuous self, “What! strangle the gentleman
for that!!”
And because men now all “hasten to be rich,” and are
“lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God,” will they necessarily,
when hanging is abrogated, and the fear of man as
well as the fear of God is removed, will such men immediately
“cease to do evil and learn to do well,” and will they
not “fall into many foolish and hurtful lusts, and bite and
devour one another?” “Whence come wars and fightings?”
Come, sir, how will you prevent crime?
“Construct suitable jails and imprison the unfortunate
criminals for life,” you reply.
And why not add—tax the widow and orphan to maintain
the murderer of the husband and father? To this you
say, and with most devout eyes turned to the clear sky,
“Well, that would teach men to return good for evil! They
ought not to be tempted and encouraged to foster a spirit of
revenge!”
What a moving picture does Christianity, thus ennobled
and refined by moonshine, present, as the Rectification stands;
the hands meekly crossed on its philanthropic, milky bosom;
its face, in humble pride, sweetly turned with a complacent
smile of a mouth puckered at the corners, and its eyes
calling up a look under the graceful curvature of brows
ready for a daguerreotype!
But, Charles, suppose a governor should pardon the unfortunate,
or that the poor deluded criminal should murder
his keeper or a fellow-prisoner?
“To be sure,” you reply, “but these are extreme cases;
and after the new era commences, governors will doubtless
be immoveable by any argument addressed to his pity, or
ambition, or covetousness, or—infidelity; jailers, too, will be
incorruptible, and criminals so pervaded with the sense of
gratitude as to render such fears as the objection hints wholly
needless.”
But what if an unfortunate criminal should, in a new fit
of insane affection—for how can a man prevent insanity—
what if he should kill his jailer or a fellow-prisoner? You
would perhaps say, “Put him straightway into two dungeons.”
Your folks, the anti-hangers, often speak of Draco;
whom, after all, they seem to imitate in sentiment. He
deemed the smallest crime worthy of death, and for the
greatest had no higher punishment; and your senators,
deeming perpetual and solitary confinement the highest possible
punishment for one deliberate or insane murder, have
none other for any additional repetitions of “the
fault,” or
crime. And why should a wretch care how many murders
he committed when one murder sentences him to a punishment,
severer than which would not await a dozen? He
would say, as the philosopher in Lucian said to Tantalus,
“Why should I fear any other doom? there is but one imprisonment.”
One of your papers sent to me affirms “that executions
in private argue shame in the public mind!” and infers that
the rational sentiment is thus shown against the punishment
of death itself.
Are all things men conceal therefore shameful? And
ought such things ever to be abandoned and avoided? May
not some things be inconvenient and unbecoming in one
place that are in all points suitable for another? Corns (in
pedes) are not cut in public; is it a shame, and hence a sin,
to eradicate them in private? Pleasantries wise men freely
indulge when together; which innocent recreation is ceased
from when a fool approaches. Why? Because in the one
case good arises; in the other, injury.
All deliberative bodies—political, legislative, ecclesiastical—sit
at times with closed doors, and yet no person believes
their secret councils necessarily traitorous or immoral.
Animals designed for the shambles bleed not in public, because,
in addition to inconvenience, danger would arise,
doubtless, to morals; but is it wicked to slaughter such animals
in private? A Grahamite can here find a powerful
reason, in the principles of the anti-hangers, for considering
our carnivorous tendency shameful and wicked.
Many good reasons exist in favor of private executions,
without inferring or saying “governments are ashamed of the
death penalty.”
Admit, reverend friend, for argument's sake, that punishment
is, as the Murderers' and Assassins' Friend Society
affirm, to reform the criminals; then, pray what time is considered
necessary to reform the said gentry—the criminals I
mean? How and when shall we be satisfied that the reformation
is complete, so that the unfortunates might be let
out with safety to our pockets and throats?
Will a whole lifetime in solitary confinement be too short
a period? Where then is the boasted efficacy of the remedy?
Will a less period than a whole life be sufficient? Then
why confine a man after he is reformed—if that be the sole
end of the penalty? Would not that be cruelty? Would
it not be tantamount to punishing an innocent person?
What! keep a poor unfortunate cut-throat in fetters and
dungeon after he has become as worthy a citizen as before
his misfortune! and when to make amends he is ready even
to marry the poor widow of the murdered man and to take
charge of the fatherless little ones! Shocking inhumanity!
savage barbarism!—and we in the nineteenth century!
Well enough for the dark ages of Moses and the ignorance
of early Christendom—but for these times of canals and rail-roads
and magnetic telegraphs!!
Oh! yes, Charles, you deem all this just like Carlton,—
but, Sir, will no modern philanthropist full of the milk of
human kindness and running over till his chin calls out for
bibs, will none such ever construct a jail-delivery system on
something like the above argument; and deeming his pet
jail-birds sufficiently reformed, determine to send them with
bran new wings, forth-flying again upon society? Are there
not persons now ready to agitate, and petition, and lecture,
and print, and to stuff mail-bags with very sapient twaddle;
and all to prove that it would be cruelty to keep a murderer
confined if it were perfectly certain he was reformed and
would never murder again? Would not such men practice
with meck governors and patriotic legislatures to pardon,
years before the end of life, whenever it seemed certain that
murderers had reformed? “Law,” it may be replied,
“would forbid pardon.” How long would that law stand
unrepealed, or how soon be disregarded in an age just coming
even more enlightened and humane than our own?
I despair not of seeing phrenological science so improved,
that the time necessary to reform criminals may be known
a priori, or rather a capite, and sentence and treatment of
murderers of insane sensibility or affection be according to
the dicta of philosophers. Even now, judges and jurors are
addressed and cautioned to decide on
such philosophic evidence;
and facts and testimony yield to the
developments, or
are explained, and diluted, and warped, to suit the
organs.
Perhaps no direct attempts are here made, but the indirect
are not wanting; and the secret persuasion of judges and
jurors seems wrought by the kind of marks and tokens that
belong to phrenology, if not to mesmerism. At all events,
we shall have then—forgive the pun—as now,
capital punishments.
I can and do with you, dear Charles, weep over those
unhappy men, who, perchance, may have been condemned
and executed wrongfully: for it seems possible, and is
doubtless true, that here and there an innocent man has perished
on the scaffold. But mistake, or even wilful advantage
taken of a good law, ought not surely to overturn all law.
Or if it overturn one, why not another? The mere error or
warping of the rule does not prove that the rule itself is
wrong. The risk men run of enduring evil or injustice, or
of losing life wrongfully, in a civilized state, is immeasurably
less than in the savage or barbarous state; and none
but an extraordinary simpleton, or most obstinate anti-gallows
advocate, would venture to say he would prefer savageism
or barbarism to a condition in which what they term legal
murder, is occasionally done on an innocent man; nor
can such prove that the occasional error or injustice is, per
se, argument for the injustice of the law itself in putting to
death the truly guilty.
Far from me to reflect on the character of some innocent
victims to a needful law, now in their bloody graves; but
yet is it most undeniable, that many, who to the last, deny
their guilt, are men of most base character, and have ever
been bosom companions of the utterly vile and abandoned;
and having by their own act destroyed the force of presumption
in their favor arising from a good and virtuous life and
proper companionship, they owe their death to their own
folly, rather than the mistake of the law. Nor is it going
too far to believe, that some such companions of thieves and
murderers, if guiltless of the one act, may have been accessory
to others, and would be, if life were spared, accessory
again.
One of the papers you forwarded to me, whilst it ferociously
advocates the anti-hang doctrine, doth actually praise
military companies!—praises trained butchers of the human
species! Nay, said paper advocates firing on mobs!—kills
by wholesale to
prevent murder! Yea, it goes for the “whole
Oregon!” When your editor reconciles his inconsistencies,
we will pay attention to his other “conclusive arguments.”
I do not know who your sapient traveller was that knew
by spying a gallows in the distance that he was approaching
a civilized land, and was so shocked that he did not go back
to the barbarians! but I do know he was either a veritable
ninny himself, or the fiction of some ninny story teller. If
the traveller preferred savage life, where murder is done by
wholesale, and the avenger of blood ever lives, why was he
coming back to civilization, where he knew the gallows
must of necessity meet his eye? I will answer for him:
that very gallows assured him that justice and protection
reigned; that a whole community were pledged for his
safety; and so, with a most puerile slander on a wholesome
law, he willingly came snugly under its guardianship.
I know this letter will cost double postage, Charles, but
that will be a proper punishment for your inclining an ear
to our modern New Lights. It will not be very surprising
if you become even an advocate, if not a member, of the
Moral Suasion Society. If you do, Charles, I will positively
lick you; I have a rod in soak.
