A TRADE OF REFUGE
THERE is no security — even the life of a steeple-climber is held by a precarious tenure. One cannot always be clinging to a spire in “the intense inane;” one must sometimes descend to “this place of wrath and tears” in order to eat and write poetry for the newspapers; and then the manifold perils besetting a surface existence begin their deadly work, and man that is born of woman is of few days and full of surprises.
Once upon a time, ‘tis said, a foolhardy steeple-jack took his life in his hands and ventured down among us. Doubtless he wanted but little here below; certainly he did not want that little long, for he made acquaintance with a trolley car and passed away forthwith. If in the moment of disaster “beneath thy wheels, O Juggernath,” it was granted to him to hear the comforting “I told you so” of some fellow craftsman in midheaven, how acutely he must have sympathized with us unfortunates condemned to dwell in the midst of alarms from the cradle to the grave!
Our hard lot must have touched him nearly; participation in its disadvantages must have brought it home to his business and bosom with a more compelling compassion than that of the tempest-tossed mariner who prays, “God help the poor devils on shore such a night as this!” In the consciousness of that sympathy — transient though it necessarily had to be — let us take heart and hope, to confront the perils of our environment. Let us walk our appointed ways among them with no less circumspection, but a superior resignation.
We cannot all be steeple-climbers. We cannot all go down to the sea in ships and know
The exulting sense, the pulse’s maddening play,
That thrill the wanderer on the trackless way as he reflects on his immunity from the insistent vehicle, the stealthy sewer gas, the subterranean steam boiler, the Conqueror Dog and all the other maleficent agencies unknown to a life on the ocean wave.
Some there must be to till the soil (mostly malarial), some to hold the offices, some to feed the dogs, some to tear up the streets, and many — oh, so many! — to write poetry for the magazines. Ships must be built for the happy, happy mariner, and steeples to exalt the prudent climber above the perilous region of industrial discontent. The timorous aviator, in pursuit of longevity must be supplied with his apparatus. By rustic and urban industries soldiers must be maintained in the security of service in partibus infidelium where the devastating open coalhole comes not to execute its prank, and missionaries outfitted to grasp the longevital advantages of labor among the cannibals. In the formation of trusts to bring the producer and consumer together in the poor-house we must toil in the pestilential atmosphere of Wall Street. The necessity of making “elevators” to dispose of the surplus population in our congested cities is imperious.
Most of these needful activities have to be conducted on the surface of the land, amidst the horrors of peace and the deadly devices of an advanced civilization. It requires the greater and more courageous part of the population to carry them on; only a few shrinking souls can afford to seek safety on the steeples.
But the lives of these have a peculiar value to the millions engaged in the perilous trades that go on below them. They are survivals of the time that was, forerunners of the time to be. They serve to remind us of that blessed barbarism — that golden age when our sylvan forefather gave himself a chance to live out half his life; and in this dark period of transition they foreshadow that brighter and better time when the land will be studded with abundant steeples of refuge for all excepting condemned criminals and enough ruffian officers of the law to operate, for their extinction, a few of the more deadly appliances and modern conveniences of civilization.
The steeple-jack is a precious possession — let him not be cast out. In order that he may not be compelled to incur the perils of the street, let him be clothed and fed with a kite.
THE DEATH PENALTY
I
“DOWN with the gallows!” is a cry not unfamiliar in America. There is always a movement afoot to make odious the just principle of “a life for a life” — to represent it as a relic of barbarism,”
“a usurpation of the divine authority,” and the rest of it. The law making murder punishable by death is as purely a measure of self-defense as is the display of a pistol to one diligently endeavoring to kill without provocation. It is in precisely the same sense an admonition, a warning to abstain from crime. Society says by that law: “If you kill one of us you die,” just as by display of the pistol the individual whose life is attacked says: “Desist or be shot.” To be effective the warning in either case must be more than an idle threat. Even the most unearthly reasoner among the anti-hanging unfortunates would hardly expect to frighten away an assassin who knew the pistol to be unloaded.
Of course these queer illogicians can not be made to understand that their position commits them to absolute non-resistance to any kind of aggression; and that is fortunate for the rest of us, for if as Christians they frankly and consistently took that ground we should be under the miserable necessity of respecting them.
We have good reason to hold that the horrible prevalence of murder in this country is due to the fact that we do not execute our laws — that the death penalty is threatened but not inflicted — that the pistol is not loaded. In civilized countries where there is enough respect for the laws to administer them, there is enough to obey them. While man still has as much of the ancestral brute as his skin can hold without cracking we shall have thieves and demagogues and anarchists and assassins and persons with a private system of lexicography who define murder as disease and hanging as murder, but in all this welter of crime and stupidity are areas where human life is comparatively secure against the human hand. It is at least a significant coincidence that in these the death penalty for murder is fairly well enforced by judges who do not derive any part of their authority from those for whose restraint and punishment they hold it. Against the life of one guiltless person the lives of ten thousand murderers count for nothing; their hanging is a public good, without reference to the crimes that disclose their deserts. If we could discover them by other signs than their bloody deeds they should be hanged anyhow. Unfortunately we must have a death as evidence. The scientist who will tell us how to recognize the potential assassin, and persuade us to kill him, will be the greatest benefactor of his century.
What would these enemies of the gibbet have? — these lineal descendants of the drunken mobs that hooted the hangman at Tyburn Tree; this progeny of criminals, which has so defiled with the mud of its animosity the noble office of public executioner that even “in this enlightened age” he shirks his high duty, entrusting it to a hidden or unnamed subordinate? If murder is unjust of what importance is it whether its punishment by death be just or not? — nobody needs to incur it. Men are not drafted for the death penalty; they volunteer. “Then it is not deterrent,” mutters the gentleman whose rude forefather hooted the hangman. Well, as to that, the law which is to accomplish more than a part of its purpose must be awaited with great patience. Every murder proves that hanging is not altogether deterrent; every hanging, that it is somewhat deterrent — it deters the person hanged. A man’s first murder is his crime, his second is ours.
The socialists, it seems, believe with Alphonse Karr, in the expediency of abolishing the death penalty; but apparently they do not hold, with him, that the assassins should begin. They want the state to begin, believing that the magnanimous example will effect a change of heart in those about to murder. This, I take it, is the meaning of their assertion that death penalties have not the deterring influence that imprisonment for life carries. In this they obviously err: death deters at least the person who suffers it — he commits no more murder; whereas the assassin who is imprisoned for life and immune from further punishment may with impunity kill his keeper or whomsoever he may be able to get at. Even as matters now are, incessant vigilance is required to prevent convicts in prison from murdering their attendants and one another. How would it be if the “life-termer” were assured against any add
itional inconvenience for braining a guard occasionally, or strangling a chaplain now and then? A penitentiary may be described as a place of punishment and reward; and under the system proposed, the difference in desirableness between a sentence and an appointment would be virtually effaced. To overcome this objection a life sentence would have to mean solitary confinement, and that means insanity. Is that what these gentlemen propose to substitute for death?
The death penalty, say these amiables and futilitarians, creates blood-thirstiness in the unthinking masses and defeats its own ends — is itself a cause of murder, not a check. These gentlemen are themselves of “the unthinking masses” — they do not know how to think. Let them try to trace and lucidly expound the chain of motives lying between the knowledge that a murderer has been hanged and the wish to commit a murder. How, precisely, does the one beget the other? By what unearthly process of reasoning does a man turning away from the gallows persuade himself that it is expedient to incur the danger of hanging? Let us have pointed out to us the several steps in that remarkable mental progress. Obviously, the thing is absurd; one might as reasonably say that contemplation of a pitted face will make a man wish to go and catch smallpox, or the spectacle of an amputated limb on the scrap-heap of a hospital tempt him to cut off his arm or renounce his leg.
“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 hook it. One is almost ashamed to dispute with such intellectual cloudings.
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 of crime, no doubt; what the wholesome proportion is none can say. 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.
III
The New Woman is against the death penalty, naturally, for she is hot and hardy in the conviction that whatever is is wrong. She has visited this world in order to straighten things about a bit, and is in distress lest the number of things be insufficient to her need. The matter is important variously; not least so in its relation to the new heaven and the new earth that are to be the outcome of woman suffrage. There can be no doubt that the vast majority of women have sentimental objections to the death penalty that quite outweigh such practical considerations in its favor as they can be persuaded to comprehend. Aided by the minority of men afflicted by the same mental malady, they will indubitably effect its abolition in the first lustrum of their political “equality.” The New Woman will scarcely feel the seat of power warm beneath her before giving to the assassin’s “unhand me, villain!” the authority of law. So we shall make again the old experiment, discredited by a thousand failures, of preventing crime by tenderness to caught criminals. And the criminal uncaught will treat us to a quantity and quality of crime notably augmented by the Christian spirit of the new régime.
IV
As to painless executions, the simple and practical way to make them both just and expedient is the adoption by murderers of a system of painless assassinations. Until this is done there seems to be no call to renounce the wholesome discomfort of the style of executions endeared to us by memories and associations of the tenderest character. There is, I fancy, a shaping notion in the observant mind that the penologists and their allies have gone about as far as they can safely be permitted to go in the direction of a softer suasion of the criminal nature toward good behavior. The modern prison has become a rather more comfortable habitation than the dangerous classes are accustomed to at home. Modern prison life has in their eyes something of the charm and glamor of an ideal existence, like that in the Happy Valley from which Rasselas had the folly to escape. Whatever advantages to the public may be secured by abating the rigors of imprisonment and inconveniences incident to execution, there is this objection: it makes them less deterrent. Let the penologers and philanthropers have their way and even hanging might be made so pleasant and withal so interesting a social distinction that it would deter nobody but the person hanged. Adopt the euthanasian method of electricity, asphyxia by smothering in rose-leaves, or slow poisoning with rich food, and the death penalty may come to be regarded as the object of a noble ambition to the bon vivant, and the rising young suicide may go and kill somebody else instead of himself, in order to receive from the public executioner a happier dispatch than his own ‘prentice hand can assure him.
But the advocates of agreeable pains and penalties tell us that in the darker ages, when cruel and degrading punishment was the rule, and was freely inflicted for every light infraction of the law, crime was more common than it is now; and in this they appear to be right. But one and all, they overlook a fact equally obvious and vastly significant: that the intellectual, moral and social condition of the masses was very low. Crime was more common because ignorance was more common, poverty was more common, sins of authority, and therefore hatred of authority, were more common. The world of even a century ago was a different world from the world of to-day, and a vastly more uncomfortable one. The popular adage to the contrary notwithstanding, human nature was not by a long cut the same then that it is now. In the very ancient time of that early English king, George III, when women were burned at the stake in public for various offenses and men were hanged for “coining” and children for theft, and in the still remoter period, (circa 1530) when poisoners were boiled in several waters, divers sorts of criminals were disembowele
d and some are thought to have undergone the peine forte et dure of cold-pressing (an infliction which the pen of Hugo has since made popular — in literature), — in these wicked old days crime flourished, not because of the law’s severity, but in spite of it. It is possible that our lawmaking ancestors understood the situation as it then was a trifle better than we can understand it on the hither side of this gulf of years, and that they were not the reasonless barbarians that we think them to have been. And if they were, what must have been the unreason and barbarity of the criminal element with which they had to deal?
I am far from thinking that severity of punishment can have the same restraining effect as probability of some punishment being inflicted; but if mildness of penalty is to be superadded to difficulty of conviction, and both are to be mounted upon laxity in detection, the pile will be complete indeed. There is a peculiar fitness, perhaps, in the fact that all these pleas for comfortable punishment should be urged at a time when there appears to be a general disposition to inflict no punishment at all. There are, however, still a few old-fashioned persons who hold it obvious that one who is ambitious to break the laws of his country will not with so light a heart and so airy an indifference incur the peril of a harsh penalty as he will the chance of one more nearly resembling that which he would himself select.
V
After lying for more than a century dead I was revived, dowered with a new body, and restored to society. The first thing of interest that I observed was an enormous building, covering a square mile of ground. It was surrounded on all sides by a high, strong wall of hewn stone upon which armed sentinels paced to and fro. In one face of the wall was a single gate of massive iron, strongly guarded. While admiring the cyclopean architecture of the “reverend pile” I was accosted by a man in uniform, evidently the warden, with a cheerful salutation.
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 300