I reject without hesitation the
punishment you propose: it violates natural feelings, it
harrows up the susceptible mind, it is tyrannical and cruel.'
Such is the language of your sentimental orators.
'But abolish any one penal law merely because it is repugnant
to the feelings of a humane heart, and, if consistent, you
abolish the whole penal code. There is not one of its
provisions that does not, in a more or less painful degree,
wound the sensibility.'
As this writer elsewhere observes: 'It is only a virtue when
justice has done its work, &c. Before this, to forgive
injuries is to invite their perpetration - is to be, not the
friend, but the enemy of society. What could wickedness
desire more than an arrangement by which offences should be
always followed by pardon?'
Sentiment is the ULTIMA RATIO FEMINARUM, and of men whose
natures are of the epicene gender. It is a luxury we must
forego in the face of the stern duties which evil compels us
to encounter.
There is only one other argument against capital punishment
that is worth considering.
The objection so strenuously pleaded by Dickens in his
letters to the 'Times' - viz. the brutalising effects upon
the degraded crowds which witnessed public executions - is no
longer apposite. But it may still be urged with no little
force that the extreme severity of the sentence induces all
concerned in the conviction of the accused to shirk the
responsibility.
