Capital Punishment - Page 2

to pay for it. Life for life; blood for blood. I have done the
crime. I am ready with the atonement. I know all about it; it's a
fair bargain between me and the law. Here am I to execute my part
of it; and what more is to be said or done?" It is the very essence
of the maintenance of this punishment for murder, that it does set
life against life. It is in the essence of a stupid, weak, or
otherwise ill-regulated mind (of such a murderer's mind, in short),
to recognise in this set off, a something that diminishes the base
and coward character of murder. "In a pitched battle, I, a common
man, may kill my adversary, but he may kill me. In a duel, a
gentleman may shoot his opponent through the head, but the opponent
may shoot him too, and this makes it fair. Very well. I take this
man's life for a reason I have, or choose to think I have, and the
law takes mine. The law says, and the clergyman says, there must be
blood for blood and life for life. Here it is. I pay the penalty."

A mind incapable, or confounded in its perceptions--and you must
argue with reference to such a mind, or you could not have such a
murder--may not only establish on these grounds an idea of strict
justice and fair reparation, but a stubborn and dogged fortitude and
foresight that satisfy it hugely. Whether the fact be really so, or
not, is a question I would be content to rest, alone, on the number
of cases of revengeful murder in which this is well known, without
dispute, to have been the prevailing demeanour of the criminal: and
in which such speeches and such absurd reasoning have been
constantly uppermost with him. "Blood for blood", and "life for
life", and such like balanced jingles, have passed current in
people's mouths, from legislators downwards, until they have been
corrupted into "tit for tat", and acted on.

Next, come the murders done, to sweep out of the way a dreaded or
detested object. At the bottom of this class of crimes, there is a
slow, corroding, growing hate. Violent quarrels are commonly found
to have taken place between the murdered person and the murderer:
usually of opposite sexes. There are witnesses to old scenes of
reproach and recrimination, in which they were the actors; and the
murderer has been heard to say, in this or that coarse phrase, "that
he wouldn't mind killing her, though he should be hanged for it"--in
these cases, the commonest avowal.

It seems to me, that in this well-known scrap of evidence, there is
a deeper meaning than is usually attached to it. I do not know, but
it may be--I have a strong suspicion that it is--a clue to the slow
growth of the crime, and its gradual development in the mind. More
than this; a clue to