LETTER XLII.
Dear Charles,—No, I am not surprised that your mind
should be disturbed by certain affirmations in the numerous
papers, circulars and pamphlets, rained down so incessantly
on you through the medium of the post-office, and which so
ferociously advocate the abolition of the death-penalty. The
execution of the murderer out in your district lately, accounts
for the fresh inundation of those blathering articles,
deemed by their authors of consequence enough to subject
the whole world to a forced tax, in the way of postage. I
should feel myself mean, if I were never willing to pay
postage for circulars and pamphlets, and the like; indeed, I
often pay it willingly, and sometimes thankfully, for some
such are sent by my friends and acquaintance; and others
are intrinsically valuable. But it vexes me to pay for quackery,
whether in the shape of advice or pills. Now itinerant
quacks do give the advice gratis, even where they fail in
selling nostrums at a thousand per cent. above cost; but the
pseudo-philanthropic quack makes you pay for the advice
itself; and even where such go about lecturing, collections
are taken to pay for heating the poker.
I have in my turn reciprocated the favors of my personal
friends, and sent them my circulars as they have sent me
theirs; but I have often forborne sending, from unwillingness
to make folks pay for my business. Once I adopted
this expedient: I directed a circular, of great importance
to myself, to Mr. Smith; and on the circular I pre-paid the
postage, that Uncle Sam should receive no detriment, and
the local postmasters might not be vexed. A circular, thus
directed and pre-paid, was sent, unsealed, to several cities
and large towns; with the hope that all the Smiths would
read it in each place, and then make known my proposals
to their friends and relatives. But sorry am I to say, the
expedient did not answer the purpose designed: the honesty,
perhaps, being so uncommon, was suspicious! Where
all are crazy it is not safe for one to be sane.
But we must not forget “the hang of the thing.” I
think, then, Charles, we need not be disturbed if it is not
in our power to show from documents, whether crime have
decreased or increased, in some communities and states,
where it is alleged capital punishment has been abolished.
For many incidental circumstances, separate from all laws,
may, for short periods, either diminish or increase crime.
Doubtless, many political, economical, literary and moral
changes in communities, affect for times the frequency
and the nature of vices and crimes. Even a good road, it
is said, has diminished highway robbery! But these very
changes, if they accompany the passage of certain laws, are
overlooked; and the infrequency of vice and crime is unjustly
attributed to the law; while other things are the true
cause.
Again, Charles, it is a remarkable fact that great crimes,
like diseases and plagues, are every now and then epidemical
or endemical, being suddenly increased both in number
and intensity, periodically. Singular accidents sometimes
occur simultaneously for weeks together. The tempter is
always busy with us; but there are occasions, when his
agency is so marked, that by way of eminence it is said,
“the very devil seems to have got into men!” and this has
a true and special sense, although it be rudely expressed.
It is not our intention to look for the causes of these facts;
but we remark in passing that the very books men read,
have a strong efficiency, often, in engendering the moral
diseases; and, by consequence, in bringing forth enormous
crimes.
As for myself, Charles, I have learned that very little
confidence is ever to be placed in ex parte testimony. Nor
are the Anti-Suspenders any more careful in collecting and
arranging facts, than other fierce reformers; whilst they
are equally obstinate in adhering to what they once affirm.
And yet, by their own showing, the favorable testimony for
abolition is for very short periods; and short periods are
not conclusive in support of an argument which, if worth
any thing, must show that the abolition would be permanently
and for ever beneficial. It is not in morals, as in mathematics—what
is true of a small triangle drawn upon your
slate, is true of a similar triangle which should be as large
as the world—but in morals, what is true at one time is always
modified by circumstances at another; and in some
circumstances it may fail entirely.
In morals, therefore, we are happily not left to experiment
nor to popular opinion. These methods may do in
sciences, but not in virtues and vices, in rewards and punishments.
Matters here are too sacred, too vital, too immediately
necessary, to be rested on inductions. We need here
eternal and imperative laws, authoritatively and explicitly set
forth; and by these we may and must go boldly and safely,
satisfied that whatever seeming evils may temporarily arise
from obedience, and seeming advantages from disobedience,
the laws are yet right. We may not, at our peril, for political
expediency, or to gratify an erroneous public opinion,
depart from such laws.
If we have recourse here to experimental methods, such
as are adopted by radical reformers and foul-mouthed abolitionists,
we learn very soon to judge of revelations from God
as right or wrong from the immediate results; and, from the
very spirit of “induction,” we are soon induced to believe,
and often both directly and indirectly to affirm that, in the
“nineteenth century,” the wisdom of man is a little better
than the wisdom God! Hence many, in defending and propagating
modern abolitionisms, do, without scruple, teach that
any Book which commands the death penalty, or defensive
war; or allows, under circumstances, a temporary and modified
slavery; or a temperate use of wine—is not from God,
and cannot be!
It cannot be concealed that, throughout the world, the
spirit of liberty is aroused; but, like all other blessings, this
state of the human mind is connected with some evils. The
obvious and natural extreme of liberty is licentiousness and
lawlessness; and if men have been for ages enslaved and
chained down to a base thraldom by lordly masters, professedly
Christian, and affecting to plead a divine warrant for
their gross intolerance and tyranny, it is next to impossible
that when men burst those shackles, they should not express
dislike, and often hatred for a Book which vile priests and
kings have ever hypocritically quoted, and falsely, against
men's natural rights.
Hence, the many attempts to do without laws, divine or
human. And hence, while endeavoring to do thus without
law, by trusting to human nature, and believing in its perfectibility
in an unrenewed state, it is natural to show, first,
if possible, that the Bible is obsolete, having had its use in
former days of darkness and despotism; and then, that, if
not wholly obsolete, it is of no authority, but must be classed
with other good and mistaken books. That a state will yet
be when the gallows (i. e. the death penalty) shall cease, is
highly probable;—not that the death penalty, when deserved,
is wrong or inhuman, or not refined enough for the age, but,
that murders will cease. Christianity, it is believed, is to
be universal; not as a mere nominal form, but vital Christianity.
Now, Charles, the Bible-men are the very men that are
diligently laboring to bring on that epoch; and they will be
instrumental in abolishing the gallows, by removing its cause.
Religious society is, every hour, endeavoring to reform the
vicious and to prevent crime; and that in ten thousand ways
overlooked not only by the World, but by Radicals and Abolitionists
themselves. And yet many of these self-styled
Philanthropists choose maliciously to insinuate, and sometimes
to affirm, that the Bible and its friends and advocates
are the cause of crime and punishment! There is, indeed,
a nominal, outside society, who may be purposely confounded
with the Christian society, and who are engaged in their
schemes of pleasure and ambition, careless who hangs, provided
themselves escape. If that society be meant, no severity
of language can exceed the blackness of its guilt; if the
true Christian society be meant, no language can set forth
the black villainy and the base hypocrisy of radical abolitionists
in confounding the two together, and in thus vilifying
the true.
The prisoner's friend, and assassin's nurse society, according
to some of their impudent publications, represent
punishment as revenge! Then, the Divine Being must be
unrighteous, who taketh vengeance, or who orders it to be
inflicted! For, if the Divine Being does take vengeance
both in this life and in the other, as must be admitted by all
who study providence or read the Bible, whence, then, arises
the presumption a priori that his commands, “blood for
blood, life for life,” are not to be understood in any sense
approximating the literal?—or that circumstances justify a
substitution of “perpetual imprisonment?” Is the moral in
our nature so unlike the moral in other parts of the universe,
or in the disembodied state, as to raise the presumption, that
a punishment ordered by God, and sanctioned by his own
action as a temporal judge in ancient Jewish times—the
times of the theocracy—is too severe; and, therefore, must
be otherwise interpreted or wholly abolished?
“Thou shalt not kill,” says the learned and astute Doctor
Daniel, “is imperative and absolute, and, therefore, thou
shalt not hang the murderers!”—I quote from one of the
pamphlets, Charles. And yet God himself—(unless some of
your gordian knot-cutters affirm it was only Moses)—as the
political governor and king of that very people, to whom the
law was first formally given, did order Achan to be stoned
to death, and appointed cities of refuge that accidental man-slayers
might be preserved from the legal and appointed
doom of the malicious murderer! Imprisonment, till the
death of the High-Priest, was, in those cities, allotted to the
accidental homicide; but death, and without commutation of
punishment, was the doom of the wilful murderer.
Doctor Daniel thinks also the command in Genesis was
a “mere prediction, that men would kill a murderer!”
Why?—because it would be wrong in the Most High to
give such a command? Show that punishment is revenge,
in a bad sense of the term; or that divine vengeance is essentially
wrong, and then these attempts to fritter away plain
English will seem less puerile and impious. But why even
a prediction, if it were not certain that the voice of reason
and nature, in all coming ages, must of necessity, like the
very voice of the Supreme himself, cry out, “blood for
blood?” “No cobbler beyond his last,” Charles; and
hence, without intending an affront to the artisan, or wishing
an undue increase of second-rate leather conveniences, the
learned doctor had better confine himself to making pegged
boots and shoes.
But, please your reverence, is not imprisonment a punishment?
and is that not also revenge? No, verily, imprisonment
is mere reformation! and a benevolent return of
good for evil!! Verily, these anti-hangers are the cream
and milksops of humanity; and they have discovered, by
induction, or reduction, or the rule of three direct, or some
other scientific process, that perpetual incarceration changes
the soul; and that, hereafter, the surest way to heaven will
be through a dungeon! Aye, this is a moral persuader, efficacious
as the flames of Tophet to renovate the spirit, and purify
a demon into an angel! Purgatory principles, Charles,
are not confined to the papists.
One learned divine across the water, and he no dissenter,
has discovered and announced that “the murderer was put
to death under the law, only as a type! that now the anti-type
being come, the typical sacrifice of the murderer, as of
all other animals, ceases of necessity!!—A murderer offered
as typical of the innocent One! I hope we have misunderstood
the quotation from his dissertation, and that the anti-gallows
paper has (and perhaps) accidentally said of the
English dignitary what is not true; but if not — —.
I dare not trust my pen any further here. As typical of
what, however, shall Rome hereafter, when fully rein-stated,
offer her bloody sacrifices of roasted heretics for a
sweet-smelling savor, if this doctor has given a probable
opinion?
Several of your pamphleteers contend that the fear of
death never deters from murder. This cannot be proved;
but if that does not, does the fear of perpetual imprisonment?
If you answer, no; then how can that punishment diminish
crime? If you say, yes; then must perpetual imprisonment
be either equal to, or greater than, death. But if
equal, it can be no more efficacious than the death penalty;
and if a greater punishment, pray where is the boasted
mercy and justice and benevolence that inflict on murderers
a punishment severer than that of the Bible?
Another assassin's friend, in answering the argument
drawn from our natural right to destroy what is about to
destroy us, contends, that if any man could hold immovable
a person threatening the other's life, he ought so to hold him;
and, therefore, says the reasoner, “society ought only to hold
the murderer fast!” Well, society has always done this.
We hold in prison, or by bail, as fast as we can, the man
that threatens our lives:—and we destroy the man that takes
our lives. We prevent as long as possible, and then we
punish. But it does not balance exactly in logic or common
sense to say, that, as we would individually and mercifully
hold fast one that threatens and intends a crime, and thus
prevent the crime, so the community ought to hold fast one
that has actually committed the crime.
Every man that has committed murder might justly
have been, in self-defence, slain by his victim, had that victim
been aware of the murderer's intention or been able to
defend himself; and why may not that murderer be with
equal justice slain by the community, the avenger of blood,
representing the weak and helpless victim of assassination?
All who “take the sword” to assassinate for malice or
money, may righteously “perish by the sword:” and thus
to defend and punish “the magistrate holds not the sword in
vain,” but, “he is God's minister” for that purpose. And
“cursed be he that holdeth back his sword” then from the
stroke of justice and of mercy:—he is false to his God and
to his neighbor.
Charles, I believe all the points are now gone over, contained
in the magazines and circulars lately sent, with a
modest and polite request that you would preach at
Somewhersburg a sermon in behalf of the “Benevolent and
Humane Fraternity of the No Chokes:” but if any qualms
remain I will try and quiet them in another epistle.
