Vacation Thoughts on Capital Punishments

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1857 Excerpt: ...doubt whether within our own memories and within the same interval, crimes so daring, so crafty and so fiendish were so rife in England as within the last ten years. At this, we marvel not. But ought not such a fact to startle our opponents? Are they quite sure that this much cherished fallacy may not produce an effect the very opposite of that intended? Is it quite clear that these blood-exhibitions may not, by familiarity, indurate men's nature 1 Or even more fatal still, may they not operate perniciously on the very classes they were expected to reform? Government by terror, is neither safe, nor politic, nor by possibility, permanent: --Government by reason is the only system applicable to man. Proofs will be found abundant in history, at once illustrative and confirmatory, of our position. Let us take one from the nation nearest us--neither locality nor time can affect a purely abstract question--namely, the probable operation of a principle. Let us look then to France, in 1793, and what do we see there? A spectacle indeed, over which humanity mourns and religion weeps: --a shattered throne--a church in ruins--a guileless monarch, the most inoffensive of his race, mercilessly butchered a few months before his queen--a degraded, plundered, disavowed nobility--a ferocious rabble revelling in blood! What could have evoked a prodigy so portentous? Surely, misgovernment even in excess, need not have transformed a population into fiends! Nor did it, reader. The blind rulers, on whom this terrible reprisal fell, were themselves the cause of the unnatural transformation. Cruel laws, cruelly executed, produced, in the end, by process of repetition, their invariable effect. They infuriated the passions--they benumbed the feelings--they petrified the very heart, of ...