LETTER XLIII.
Dear Charles,—And why should I guard my words and
speak more reverently of mock philanthropy and of pseudo-patriots?
Do you clergy always weigh your words, and
grease your phrases, and pucker up your sentences, in a
free conversation, around a host's table, or at his fireside,
at your clerical conventions, during recesses? Does a
burning indignation there, sometimes vent itself in homely
and unpremeditated terms—and wonder why some one does
not dare to speak openly about such things, and call them
by appropriate names? And then, when some one boldly
looks humbug in the face, and honestly tells him he is a fool
and a liar—you all at once grow grave—frown upon your
brother—and wonder at his rashness and levity! I tell you,
Charles, this is very ungenerous and not a little hypocritical.
Some connected with ultraists and radicals are doubtless
worthy, pious, and honest men. But very many abolitionists,
and especially among the anti-gallows men, are sheer infidels
—persons who dexterously avail themselves of peculiar
states of the public, to bring the divine revelation into discredit.
Besides, these milkmen do themselves speak very
sneeringly of justice and of a solemn punishment authorized
by the Most High, and call it—“choking, strangling, throtling,
stretching,” and the like.
And is not the chief ding-dong of their contemptible
whine, addressed to the prejudices and the passions and evil
principles of men? Is not their whole clatter an appeal to
democratical principles—as if democracy were the Judge
and the Ruler from whose decision and action ought to be,
and could be, no appeal? Most rampant fellows would willingly
decide moral and scientific questions by the vote of a
mass meeting, as they decide questions of politics and economy!
Their hired agents—like borers, or drill sergeants—
would cry up and drum up voters to settle points of eternal
moment by the ballot-box! All such are willing to number
arguments and not to weigh them.
What an argument, domine, is that ever reiterated story
which tells of the difficulty in empannelling a jury to try a
man for murder when death is the penalty! Is it meant by
this, that the majority of men every where have true opinions,
and therefore will not be accessory to what is called
legal murder? Then we utterly deny that their opinions are
right; and affirm that many jurors are thus guilty of great
sin who refuse to obey a law of eternal obligation. It may
be the fashion to laud such persons; but they are utterly
unworthy of being themselves protected by law, who disregard
the nature of justice, and, whilst under oath, deliberately
throw down the grand barriers against crime.
It is meant, however, that the moral sense of the age is
so debased, and men think so lightly of crime and so badly
of severe punishment, that we must lower the laws to their
level. This doctrine of expediency is a great favorite with
many who take part with false philanthropists in their measures,
and who yet affect to say that the death penalty is
doubtless right per se. It seems, then, that an age extolled
to the heavens for advancement in all sorts of good things
and refinements, is yet gone backward in the love of justice
and of stern morality! Well, if the age is so utterly and
hopelessly lost as to debar the best laws, we must be content
with the worse or the less good; if in an evil and adulterous
generation we cannot have a natural and divine law, which
demands the death of the murderer, we must of necessity
be content with man's law, which orders him to be caged for
a pet! While, however, we are compelled by numbers to
yield to necessity, let our solitary voices ever be heard in
decided protest against impiety and presumption. A near
inspection will convince you, Charles, that very many who
affect to deplore it, are yet secretly pleased with this rebellious
state of the age; and while they prate about expediency
and policy, which require the relaxed law, these fellows are
inwardly delighted that eternal law cannot prevail.
Besides, these very persons do themselves in many ways
produce, and cherish, this relaxed and sickly public opinion:
—and then they plead that very state as the main reason for
an accommodated law! In this way, all important laws
may be assailed, and all virtue in certain communities annihilated.
Depend on it, Charles, this world is at invincible
enmity with solemn, sacred, and eternal truth—it is high,
we cannot attain unto it! The human heart will not, if it
can under any pretext avoid it, yield to a divine authority; it
will devise endless schemes and seize every opportunity to
throw off that authority. An accommodating Christianity
will be received and praised—but a Christianity that pleads
for justice as well as mercy is ever scornfully rejected and
bitterly hated; and the advocates of such a religion will be
deemed the enemies of the world, and would be destroyed if
that world had its wish or the power. There is a more immediate
and intimate connection between theological creeds
and public opinion and action, than some would suppose.
Belief and doctrine in regard to original and total depravity;—the
native enmity of man towards the law of God;
—the wilful powerlessness of our nature as to good;—
the justice of God, and the necessity of an atonement;—
belief and doctrine on such points affect the people, the law-maker,
the judge, the juror, the governor; and these do act
accordingly, in their several capacities.
In all the abolition movements, however mildly and plausibly
and benevolently they may really, or in appearance,
begin, there does very soon follow a species of reasoning
striking at the root of some eternal truth; and more especially
at the inflexible justice of God; which reasoning, if
extended legitimately, must overthrow the government of the
Most High, and would forbid all future doom of the wicked.
Some reasoning, if such it may be denominated, makes
us distrust the divine benevolence. For instance, is it a good
argument against “the choking” of a murderer, “that he is
shockingly convulsed by it and evidentally in great pain?”—
an argument I find in some pamphlets and newspapers. What
then is the similar argument when we suffer by sickness, or
by a natural dissolution? If conclusive against benevolence
in one case, why not in another?
What means all the parading of the circumstances, the
dwelling upon the pathos of the “tragedy,” as it is called,
but to beget a hatred of the punishment and the justice?
Can no melancholy be found at the death of an infant? And
why is not that a “tragedy” too? Yes—I well know the
wincing such application of false or anti-gallows doctrines
may make in some minds; yet, Charles, believe me, some
hypocritical pseudo-philanthropists secretly design that such
application shall be made, and inwardly chuckle at their
successful adroitness!
The spirit of mawkish sentimentality prevails; and the
spirit of infidelity combines with it, endeavoring, in the guise
of an angel of light, to muster forces for a fierce conflict
with revealed truth. And the spirit of infidelity does beguile
in this way the “unstable and unlearned.” But,
Charles, when the voice of a brother's blood cries to men in
vain from the earth, that blood shall be required at their
hands, who have, with soft and silken tones of sickly and
sentimental philanthropy, said to the murdered, crying thus
from the bloody grave;—“Peace, peace,—cry not thus
for vengeance, thou unholy one! Be forgiving—and stay
that unrighteous brawling! Know, this enlightened and
virtuous community will never minister to thy unchristian
thirst for vengeance! We feed thy enemy—we clothe him—
we return him good for evil! Rest quiet in thy gory grave,
thou unchristian one!”
Thus they lay the ghost of the murdered, and with meek
and saintly faces, look around for applause, while they
tread down the crimson earth upon the gashed bosom of the
dead. Aye! that voice will cry again; and that despised
and mocked one shall stand accusing at a throne where
justice will be done! and there the democratic mass meeting
of innumerable worlds dare not say—No!
Oh! ye truckling politicians—ye vile and false demagogues—ye
betrayers of men, in not administering justice—
where then your sophisms, and adroitness, and onion-created
tears of crocodile hypocrisy, and your honors and greetings
from human applause? Will these be veil enough in that
day? The withering scorn of an everlasting contempt shall
then begin, like a quenchless fire and undying worm, to prey
on your conscience! To sport with the blood of your murdered
brother is no small crime, and you will find then how
you were a “brother's keeper;” and the gaping of his
gory wounds will haunt you for ever; while the grinning
assassin, an unholy apostate that trampled, in devilish malice,
on his Maker's image, will dance around, and striking
you with his bloody hand, thank you for benevolence and
mercy!
No, I cannot say that I am surprised at the course of
that Legislature. I knew its former constituents; many
of them personally, and all of them by character. This last
act is only another exemplification of their moral cowardice
and want of stamina. They always did maintain that the
sovereignty intrusted to them by the people, should ever be
thrown back to the people; and were ready to do what people
or party wished, right or wrong! Now they have only
essayed to please sovereigns of opposite sentiments, and, on
the principle of the honest fellow who prayed both ways at
once, being, as he said, uncertain into whose hands he
might fall. Public opinion is their god; and hence, if a
jury say hang, then hanging is justice; but if they say imprison,
then imprisonment is justice! Yes, they have given
the world the highest lesson of adroit and irresponsible and
all-pleasing legislation! and yet no wonder, for they have
practised long enough to be perfect.
But tell me, dominie, if hereafter crime diminish out
there, to what will it be owing? Will it be to the fear of
imprisonment, or of death? How is a doubtful sentence to
serve as the experiment? And will the difficulty in empannelling
a jury to try a murderer be increased or diminished,
by allowing the jury to say, in addition to guilty or
not guilty, whether the criminal shall die, or be incarcerated?
And will juries of opposite conscientious views be
any more likely to agree than before?
Other anti-chokers are the milk, and cream too, of all
humanity; but these backwoods sages are the blue milk
philanthropists—sickly moralists, who live on the fetid
breath of mere opinion, and to whom nothing is so important
as a “seat in the House.” If legislators always represent
the independence and patriotism and wisdom of our country
—alas for the scant patterns!
