“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” say the opponents of the death penalty, “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 practicable, but he who denies its justice must deny also the justice of a bushel of corn for a bushel of corn, a dollar for a dollar, service for service.  We can not undertake by such clumsy means as laws and courts to do to the criminal exactly “what he has done to his victim, but to demand a life for a life is simple, practicable, expedient and (therefore) right.

“Taking the life of a murderer does not restore the life he took, therefore it is a most illogical punishment.  Two wrongs do not make a right.”

Here’s richness!  Hanging an assassin is illogical because it does not restore the life of his victim; incarceration is logical; therefore, incarceration does—­quod, erat demonstrandum.

Two wrongs certainly do not make a right, but the veritable thing in dispute is whether taking the life of a life-taker is a wrong.  So naked and unashamed an example of petitio principii would disgrace a debater in a pinafore.  And these wonder-mongers have the effrontery to babble of “logic”!  Why, if one of them were to meet a syllogism in a lonely road he would run away in a hundred and fifty directions as hard as ever he could hoof it.  One is almost ashamed to dispute with such intellectual cloutlings.

Whatever an individual may rightly do to protect himself society may rightly do to protect him, for he is a part of itself.  If he may rightly take life in defending himself society may rightly take life in defending him.  If society may rightly take life in defending him it may rightly threaten to take it.  Having rightly and mercifully threatened to take it, it not only rightly may take it, but expediently must.

II

The law of a life for a life does not altogether prevent murder.  No law can altogether prevent any form of crime, nor is it desirable that it should.  Doubtless God could so have created us that our sense of right and justice could have existed without contemplation of injustice and wrong; as doubtless he could so have created us that we could have felt compassion without a knowledge of suffering; but he did not.  Constituted as we are, we can know good only by contrast with evil.  Our sense of sin is what our virtues feed upon; in the thin air of universal morality the altar-fires of honor and the beacons of conscience could not be kept alight.  A community without crime would be a community without warm and elevated sentiments—­without the sense of justice, without generosity, without courage, without mercy, without magnanimity—­a community of small, smug souls, uninteresting to God and uncoveted by the Devil.  We can have, and do have, too much crime, no doubt; what the wholesome proportion is none can tell.  Just now we are running a good deal to murder, but he who can gravely attribute that phenomenon, or any part of it, to infliction of the death penalty, instead of to virtual immunity from any penalty at all, is justly entitled to the innocent satisfaction that comes of being a simpleton.