There should be no such person as an habitual criminal, and there would be none if criminals were not permitted to breed. There are several ways to prevent them — some, like perpetual imprisonment, too expensive; others impossible of discussion here. The best practical and discussible way is to kill them. And in this is no injustice. The man who will not live at peace with his countrymen has no inherent right to live at all. The community against which he wages private war has as clear a right to deprive him of his life as of his liberty by imprisonment, or his property by fines.
We grade crimes and punishments only for expediency, not because there are degrees of guilt, for it is as easy to obey the law against theft as the law against murder, and the true criminality of an offense against the state lies in its infraction of the law, not in the damage to its victim. The venerable dictum that, whereas
It is a sin to steal a pin,
It is a greater to steal a potater,
is brilliant, but erroneous. Logically there are no degrees of crime; a misdemeanor is as hardy a defiance of the community as a felony. The distinction is an administrative fiction to facilitate punishment. It is thought that rather than condemn a misdemeanant to perpetual restraint in prison or death on the gallows jurors would acquit him; and indubitably they would. The purpose of these feeble remarks is to lead public opinion upward through flowery paths of reason to a higher philosophy and a broader conception of duty.
My notion is that a great saving of life and property could be effected by extermination of habitual criminals. Some crime would remain. Under the stress of want, men would occasionally take the property of others; crazed by sudden rage, they would sometimes slay; and so forth. But crimes of premeditation would disappear and the enormously expensive machinery of justice could be abolished. One small prison might suffice for an entire nation. A few courts of criminal jurisdiction, an insignificant constabulary, would preserve the peace and punishment could be made truly reformatory — it would not need to be deterrent. In short, the dream of the reformer, with his everlastingly futile methods of deterrence by mental and moral education, could be made to come to pass in a generation or two by the forthright and merciful plan of effacing the criminal class.
Of course I do not mean to advocate the death penalty for every premeditated infraction of the law, nor do I know how many convictions should be considered as proving the offender an habitual criminal; but certainly I think that, having exceeded the number allowed him, his right to life should be held to have lapsed and he should be removed from this vale of tears forthwith. The fact that a man who habitually breaks the law may be better than another who habitually obeys it, or the fact that he who is convicted may be less guilty than he who escapes conviction, has nothing to do with the matter. If we can not remove all the irreclaimable the greater is the expediency of removing all that we can catch and convict. The law’s inadequacy and inconsistency are patent, but they constitute the silliest plea for “mercy” that stupidity has ever invented.
II
This is an age of mercy to the merciless. The good Scriptural code, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” has fallen into the sere and yellow leaf: it is a creed outworn. We have replaced it with a régime of “reformation,” a penology of persuasion. In our own country this sign and consequence of moral degeneration, this power and prevalence of the mollycoddle, are especially marked. We no longer kill our assassins; as a rule, the only disadvantages they suffer for killing us are those incident to detention for acquittal, with a little preaching to remind them of their mortality. Wherefore our homicide list is about twice annually that of the battle of Gettysburg.
The American prison of to-day is carefully outfitted with the comforts of home. Those who succeed in breaking into it find themselves distinctly advantaged in point of housing, and are clothed and fed better than they ever were before, or will be elsewhere. Light employment, gentle exercise, cleanliness, and sound sleep reward them, and when expelled their one ambition is to go back. The “reformation” consists in lifting them to a higher plane of criminality: the man who enters as a stupid thief is graduated a competent forger, and comes back (if he can) with an augmented self-respect and an ambition to kill the warden. Some of us old fogies think that a prison was best worth its price to the community when it was a place that a rascal would rather die out of than get into; but we are voces in deserto and in the ramp and roar of the new penology altogether unheard.
These remarks are suggested by something in France. In that half-sister republic the guillotine, though still a lawful dissuader from the error of assassination, is not at the time of writing in actual use. Murderers are still sentenced to it, but always the sentence is commuted to imprisonment during life or good behavior. Coincidently with the decline of the guillotine there is a notable rise in the rate of assassination. Somebody having had the sagacity to suggest the possibility of something more than an accidental relation between the two phenomena, it occurred to a Parisian editor to collect “views” as to the expediency of again bringing knife and neck together in the good old way. He got views of all sorts of kinds, naturally, and knows almost as much about public opinion as he did before. It is interesting to note that the literary class is nearly a unit against the chopping-block, as was to be expected: persons who work with the head naturally set a high value upon it — an over-appraisement in their own case, for their heads are somewhat impaired by their habit of housing their hearts in them. There was an honorable minority: Mistral, the Provencal poet, who pointed out (in verse) that a people too squeamish to endure the shedding of criminal blood has taken a long step in the downward path leading to feebleness.
Wherefore I say: Bravo, Mistral! You have done something to prove that not all poets are persons of criminal instincts.
III
There is a general tendency to attribute the popular distrust of the death penalty to the “softening” effect of civilization. One might accept that view without really agreeing with its expounder; for it is the human heart which the expounder believes to have been softened, whereas there is reason to think that the softening process has involved the human head.
As a matter of fact, gentlemen experiencing an inhospitality to the death penalty (including those on the gallows) should not felicitate themselves; their feeling is due to quite other causes. It is mostly a heritage of unreason from the dark ages when in all Europe laws were made and enforced, with no great scruples of conscience, by conquerors and the descendants of conquerors alien in blood, language and manners. Between these and the masses of the original inhabitants there was no love lost. The peasantry hated their foreign oppressors with a silent antipathy which, like a covered fire, burned with a sullen and more lasting fervor for lack of vent. Hatred of the oppressor embraced hatred of all his works and ways, his laws included, and from hatred of particular laws to hatred of all law the transition was easy, natural and, human nature being what it is, inevitable.
So there is a distinctly traceable connection between wars of conquest and sympathy with crime — between the subjugation of races and their disrespect of law. Here we find the true fountain and origin of anarchism. A country “occupied” implies a people imbruted. It may some time “assimilate” with its conquerors, bringing to the new compound, as in the instance of the Anglo-Saxon combination with the Norman-French, some of the sturdiest virtues of the new national life; but along with these it will surely bring servile vices acquired during the period of inharmony. There is no doubt that much of whatever turbulence and lawlessness distinguish the American people from the more orderly communities across the sea is the work of William the Conqueror and his men-at-arms. The evil that they did lives after them in the congenial conditions supplied by a republic.
What manner of men the Anglo-Saxons became under Norman dominion before the moral renascence is shown in all the chronicles of the time. A Roman historian has described the Saxon of the period as a naked brute, who lay all day by his fireside sluggish and di
rty, always eating and drinking. Even after the assimilation was nearly complete — no longer ago than “the spacious times of great Elizabeth,” who, by the way, used to thwack her courtiers on the mazzard when they displeased her — the homogeneous race was a lawless lot. Speaking of their fondness for violent bodily exercise and their inaccessibility to the softer sentiments, Taine says:
This is why man, who for three centuries had been a domestic animal, was still almost a savage beast, and the force of his muscles and the strength of his nerves increased the boldness and energy of his passions. Look at these uncultivated men, men of the people, how suddenly the blood warms and rises to their faces; their fists double, their lips press together and their vigorous bodies rush at once into action. The courtiers of that age were like our men of the people. They had the same taste for the exercise of their limbs, the same indifference to the inclemencies of the weather, the same coarseness of language, the same undisguised sensuality.
Before he grew too fat, Henry VIII was so fond of wrestling that he took a fall out of Francis I on the field of the Cloth of Gold.
“That,” says the historian of English literature, “is how a common soldier or a bricklayer nowadays tries a new comrade. In fact, they regarded gross jests and brutal buffooneries as amusements, as soldiers and bricklayers do now. * * * They thought insults and obscenity a joke. They were foul-mouthed, they listened to Rabelais’ words undiluted, and delighted in conversation that would revolt us. They had no respect for humanity; the rules of proprieties and the habits of good breeding began only in the time of Louis XIV, and by imitation of the French.”
Such were “our sturdy Anglo-Saxon ancestors” from whom we inherit our no good opinion of the law and our selfish indisposition to the penalty of death.
ON THE USES OF EUTHANASIA
I
THE proposal to forestall a painful death by a painless one is not, to normal sensibilities, “shocking.” If persuaded of its expediency no physician should give it a hesitating advocacy through fear of being thought brutal. It is an error to suppose that familiarity with death and suffering exhausts the springs of compassion in one born compassionate. Like many other qualities, compassion grows by use: none has more of it than the physician, the nurse, the soldier in war. He to whom the menace of an injustice is a louder voice than the call of conscience has no standing in the House of Pain, no warrant to utter judgment as to the conduct of its affairs.
Pain is cruel, death is merciful. Prolongation of a mortal agony is hardly less barbarous than its infliction. Who when sane in mind and body would not choose to guard himself against a futile suffering by an assurance of accelerated release? Every memory is charged with instances, observed or related, of piteous appeals for death from the white lips of agony, yet how rarely can these formulate the prayer!
To its concession, regulated by law, there is the objection that law is frangible and judgment fallible. But that objection has no greater cogency in this than in other matters; laws we must have, and execute them with such care as we can. Our courts sometimes err in the diagnosis of crime, yet they warrant our trust in the general service of our need. The mariner’s compass is fallible, the winds baffle and the waves destroy; yet we have navigation. Even the anarchist cries out against law, not because it does not accomplish its purpose, but because, roughly, it does.
We build civilization with such tools as we have; if we waited for perfect ones the structure would never rise. The juror is no more nearly just and infallible than the physician; if we can entrust ourselves with death as a penalty for crime we need not shrink from the no more awful responsibility of according it as a boon to hopeless pain. In neither case can a blunder do more than hasten the inevitable. “When I was born I cried,” said a philosopher; “now I know why.” He did not know why; it was because at the moment of his birth Nature spoke the sentence of his death.
It may be that proponents of euthanasia for suffering incurables are pushing their adventurous feet too far ahead in the march of mind to expect anything better in the nature of encouragement than a copious dead-catting and bad-egging from laggard processionists arear. Sometimes, however, they get decenter treatment than they have the hardihood to claim: occasionally, through the roar of calumniation is heard the voice of dull and dignified protestation, even of argument. For example, The British Medical Journal once pointed out, with more gravity than grammar, that “the medical profession has always strongly, set its face against a measure that would inevitably pave the way to the grossest abuses, and which would degrade them to the position of executioners.”
I don’t know that the medical profession speaks with any special authority in a matter of this kind. Perhaps it knows a little better than other trades and professions that cases of hopeless agony are of frequent occurrence, but as to the expediency of relieving them by the compassionate coup de grace — of that a physician is no better judge than anyone else. As to the fear of being “degraded to the position of executioners,” the position is not degrading. The office of executioner — even when execution is punishment, not mercy — is, and should be considered, an almost sacred office. Its popular disrepute harks back to the bad old days when a majority of the people in countries now partly civilized were criminal in act or sympathy, living in hate and terror of the law — the days of Tyburn Tree with its roaring mobs, cheering the malefactor and pelting the hangman. It was not from fear of a merely social reprobation that the mediæval headsman wore a mask; it was from fear of being torn to pieces if ever recognized unguarded in the public street. A man of to-day, ambitious to prove his descent from a criminal ancestry, can most easily do so by damning the hangman. His humble origin is no disgrace to him if he is a good citizen, but it makes him invincible to the suasion of argument against his fad. One might as profitably attempt to reform the color of his eyes or dissuade him from the shape of his nose.
II
“It is a physician’s mission to cure disease and alleviate suffering,” says Dr. Nehemiah Nickerson. “There is a point beyond which he can not cure disease; after that it is his duty to alleviate suffering.”
A mission implies a mandate; a mandate an authority superior to that of the missionary. I do not know from what higher authority a physician derives his own, nor who has the right to lay down the lines within which his activity must lie. Within the civil and the moral law he is a free agent — free to observe or disregard the customs of his trade, as conscience may determine. He has no mandate, no mission.
It is true, however, that to cure disease and to alleviate suffering are purposes commonly recognized as important among those belonging to the practice of medicine. Having failed to accomplish the first, how far may a physician go in accomplishing the second? — that is a question that finds no answer in any imaginary mandate. It is not even answered by the Decalogue, for the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” has so many obvious and necessary limitations that its value as a guide to conduct is virtually nothing. Dr. Nickerson believes he may go so far as to kill the patient he can not cure. Moreover, he candidly affirms his habit of doing so. I am told that he is a distinguished physician; there is apparently nothing in his frank avowal to lessen his distinction. It would not surprise, indeed, if his fame should take attention from even the officers of the law. To make himself an object of lively interest in quarters where the several kinds of distinction in his profession are commonly overlooked he has only to descend from generals to particulars, naming the patients whom he has turned out of the frying-pan of physical pain into whatever state awaited them, and the means (under Providence) which he employed to that end.
A man may be the best judge of what he is for, but by laymen unskilled in physic it is usually held that a physician’s business is not only to cure disease and alleviate suffering, but to prolong life — to save it altogether being impossible, for all must eventually die. But laymen have no mandate always to be right; now and again they have been in error. The righteousness and expediency of relea
sing an incurable sufferer from the horrors of life should not be clouded and discredited by an erring advocacy.
When a horse or a dog incurs the mischance of a broken back no question is raised as to the propriety of “putting it out of its misery.” Unable to cure it, we kill it, and in doing so feel a comfortable sense of benevolence, a consciousness of having performed a disagreeable duty, of having discharged an obligation inseparable from our dominion over the beasts of the field. It may be said that in the instance of a human being similarly incurable the dominion is lacking. But that does not go to the root of the matter, and is, moreover, untrue; for a helpless man is as much subject to our power as a helpless animal, and as much a charge upon our good will. And in many cases he is as little capable of deciding wisely what is good for him. A wounded bird or squirrel will manifest a strong indisposition to be “put out of misery,” by struggling to escape into the bush; a man will sometimes beg for death, even when he does not know himself incurable. If there should be a difference in the treatment of the two in respect of the matter in hand it would seem that the beast should be spared and the man killed.
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 263