834 ^^^ POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



image. The strictest or most intolerant (put it as you choose) creeds 

 give a man until after death without repentance before consigning 

 him to perdition everlasting. Here, however, the State shuts out a 

 man from repentance, treats him as a brute who \i^% forfeited all right 

 to consideration as a man. For, when we inflict ignominy, we do all 

 this. In doing this, in disgracing a being created in the image of 

 God, we simply insult the great Being who has implanted his image 

 and spirit in all of us. However far we may stray from grace, we can 

 not, by our acts, divest ourselves of our human nature or forfeit our 

 claim to consideration as human beings. 



The advocates of cruel punishments ask, How can you cope with 

 brutality and brutal men unless you treat such men after their own 

 fashion ? You must meet brutality with brutality, is their plea ; you 

 must adopt strong remedies for evils that will not yield to mild meas- 

 ures. It might be answered that such punishments do not fulfill their 

 end, and the history of all times and the testimony of the most en- 

 lightened students of such questions in all countries might be appealed 

 to in confirmation. When, under English law, two hundred different 

 actions, "many of them," according to a great writer on criminal 

 jurisprudence, "not deserving the name of offenses," were punishable 

 by death, and offenders were whipped, scourged, pilloried, hanged, 

 quartered and sometimes roasted alive, crime was not less frequent, 

 nor were the laws violated with less ado than to-day. The very cir- 

 cumstance that whipping and similar punishments have had their day 

 of trial and were abolished by a generation that witnessed the work- 

 ings of the system in all its full-blown beauty, demonstrates its unsat- 

 isfactory character to the minds of those best acquainted with it. 

 But I go further. Crime is inherent in our defective civilization, and 

 you can't hurry up the march of civilization in any such patent way 

 as lashing men. Criminal law is not a panacea to soften the human 

 heart. Civilization has reached a certain height or state of develop- 

 ment, and sin and crime are concomitants of that state. While crime 

 must be punished, it can not be wiped out. Human nature is so con- 

 stituted that men revolt at the deliberate infliction of pain upon a 

 fellow-being, more so, indeed, than at any violence or brutality com- 

 mitted by the offender in the heat of passion. Any punishment that 

 shocks the moral sense of a community, as all cruel punishments are 

 calculated to do, falls short of its mark and fails signally to produce 

 the general satisfaction always arising from the administration of wise 

 punishments. Wife-boating is the outcome of a state of society that 

 produces numerous evils of equal degree of which the general public, 

 not acquainted with reformatory work among criminals, are entirely 

 ignorant. Brutal as the offense is, brutality will not be suppressed, 

 civilization will not be advanced one shade nor society benefited or 

 protected by resort to retaliatory punishments. That kind of proceed- 

 ing always defeats its own object. 



