human being--to consider the social right to kill rather than the
individual right to kill. Public morals being so far in the rear of
private morals, it raises an entirely different question from that
suggested by Mr Justice Darling's remark. Mr Justice Darling laid it
down that the private citizen has not--except, it may be presumed, in
the last necessities of self-defence--the right to kill even the most
worthless and treacherous of human beings. The spy, the sweater, the
rack-renter, the ravisher--each has the right to trial by his peers.
This, I believe, is good morals as well as good law. Even where it is
a case of a blackguard's commission of some unspeakable crime for
which there is no legal redress, though we may sympathise with his
murderer, we cannot praise the murder. There are, it may be admitted,
cases of murder with a high moral purpose. These are especially
abundant in the annals of political assassination, which may be
described as private murder for public reasons. Very few of us would
claim to be the moral equals of Charlotte Corday, and we have abased
ourselves for centuries before the at-last-suspected figures of
Harmodius and Aristogeiton. There are crimes which are the crimes of
saints. Our reverence for the saintliness leads us almost into a
reverence for the crime. The hero of Finland a few years ago was a
young man who slew a Russian tyrant at the expense of his own life.
Deeds like this have the moral glow of self-sacrifice beyond one's own
most daring attempts at virtue. How, then, is one to condemn them? But
we condemn them by implication if we do not believe in imitating them;
and few of us would believe in imitating them to the point of
bringing up our children to be even the most honourable of assassins.
One unconsciously analyses these crimes into their elements, some of
them noble, some of them the reverse. One has heard, again, of what
may be called private murders for family reasons--crimes of revenge
for some wrong done to a mother, a sister, or a child. Even here,
however, one knows that it is against the interests of the State and
of the race that we should admit the right to kill. Once allow crimes
of indignation, and every indignant man will claim to be a law to
himself. It may be that the prohibition of murder--even murder with
the best intentions--is in the interests of society rather than of any
absolute code of morality. But even so society must set up its own
code of morality