due to the fact that we do not execute our laws--that
the death penalty is threatened but not inflicted--that the pistol is
not loaded. In civilized countries where there is enough respect for the
laws to administer them, there is enough to obey them. While man still
has as much of the ancestral brute as his skin can hold without cracking
we shall have thieves and demagogues and anarchists and assassins and
persons with a private system of lexicography who define murder as
disease and hanging as murder, but in all this welter of crime and
stupidity are areas where human life is comparatively secure against the
human hand. It is at least a significant coincidence that in these the
death penalty for murder is fairly well enforced by judges who do not
derive any part of their authority from those for whose restraint and
punishment they hold it. Against the life of one guiltless person the
lives of ten thousand murderers count for nothing; their hanging is a
public good, without reference to the crimes that disclose their
deserts. If we could discover them by other signs than their bloody
deeds they should be hanged anyhow. Unfortunately we must have a death
as evidence. The scientist who will tell us how to recognize the
potential assassin, and persuade us to kill him, will be the greatest
benefactor of his century.

What would these enemies of the gibbet have--these lineal descendants
of the drunken mobs that hooted the hangman at Tyburn Tree; this progeny
of criminals, which has so defiled with the mud of its animosity the
noble office of public, executioner that even "in this enlightened age"
he shirks his high duty, entrusting it to a hidden or unnamed
subordinate? If murder is unjust of what importance is it whether its
punishment by death be just or not?--nobody needs to incur it. Men are
not drafted for the death penalty; they volunteer. "Then it is not
deterrent," mutters the gentleman whose rude forefather hooted the
hangman. Well, as to that, the law which is to accomplish more than a
part of its purpose must be awaited with great patience. Every murder
proves that hanging is not altogether deterrent; every hanging, that it
is somewhat deterrent--it deters the person hanged. A man's first murder
is his crime, his second is ours.

The socialists, it seems, believe with Alphonse Karr, in the expediency
of abolishing the death penalty; but apparently they do not hold, with
him, that the assassins should begin. They