sentence would
have to mean solitary confinement, and that means insanity. Is that what
these Theosophical gentlemen propose to substitute for death?

These petitioners call the death penalty "a relic of barbarism," which
is neither conclusive nor true. What is required is not loose assertion
and dogs-eared phrases, but evidence of futility, or, in lack of that,
cogent reasoning. It is true that the most barbarous nations inflict the
death penalty most frequently and for the greatest number of offenses,
but that is because barbarians are more criminal in instinct and less
easily controlled by gentle methods than civilized peoples. That is
why we call them barbarous. It is not so very long since our English
ancestors punished more than forty kinds of crime with death. The fact
that the hangman, the boiler-in-oil and the breaker-on-the-wheel had
their hands full does not show that the laws were futile; it shows that
the dear old boys from whom we are proud to derive ourselves were a bad
lot--of which we have abundant corroborative evidence in their brutal
pastimes and in their manners and customs generally. To have restrained
that crowd by the rose-water methods of modern penology--that is
unthinkable.

The death penalty, say the memorialists, "creates blood-thirstiness in
the unthinking masses and defeats its own ends. It is a cause of
murder, not a check." These gentlemen are themselves of "the unthinking
masses"--they do not know how to think. Let them try to trace and
lucidly expound the chain of motives lying between the knowledge that
a murderer has been hanged and the wish to commit a murder. How,
precisely, does the one beget the other? By what unearthly process of
reasoning does a man turning away from the gallows persuade himself that
it is expedient to incur the danger of hanging? Let us have pointed out
to us the several steps in that remarkable mental progress. Obviously,
the thing is absurd; one might as reasonably say that contemplation of
a pitted face will make a man go and catch smallpox, or the spectacle of
an amputated limb on the scrap-heap of a hospital tempt him to cut off
his arm.

"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," says the Theosophist, "is
not justice. It is revenge and unworthy of a Christian civilization." It
is exact justice: nobody can think of anything more accurately just
than such punishments would be, whatever the motive in awarding them.
Unfortunately such a system is not pr