The excess of sentiment, which is misleading in philanthropy and economics, grows acutely dangerous when it interferes with legislation, or with the ordinary rulings of morality. The substitution of a sentimental principle of authority for the impersonal processes of law confuses our understanding, and undermines our sense of justice. It is a painful truth that most laws have had their origin in a profound mistrust of human nature (even Mr. Olney admits that the Constitution, although framed in the interests of freedom, is not strictly altruistic); but the time is hardly ripe for brushing aside this ungenerous mistrust, and establishing the social order on a basis of pure enthusiasm. The reformers who light-heartedly announce that people are “tired of the old Constitution anyway,” voice the buoyant creed of ignorance. I once heard a popular lecturer say of a popular idol that he “preferred making precedents to following them,” and the remark evoked a storm of applause. It was plain that the audience considered following a precedent to be a timorous and unworthy thing for a strong man to do; and it was equally plain that nobody had given the matter the benefit of a serious thought. Believers in political faith-healing enjoy a supreme immunity from doubt.
This growing contempt for paltry but not unuseful restrictions, this excess of sentiment, combined with paucity of humour and a melodramatic attitude toward crime, has had some discouraging results. It is ill putting the strong man, or the avenging angel, or the sinned-against woman above the law, which is a sacred trust for the preservation of life and liberty. It is ill so to soften our hearts with a psychological interest in the lawbreaker that no criminal is safe from popularity. The “Nation” performed a well-timed duty when it commented grimly on the message sent to the public by a murderer, and a singularly cold-blooded murderer, through the minister who attended him on the scaffold: “Mr. Beattie desired to thank his many friends for kind letters and expressions of interest, and the public for whatever sympathy was felt or expressed.”
It sounds like a cabinet minister who has lost an honoured and beloved wife; not like an assassin who has lured his wife to a lonely spot, and there pitilessly killed her. One fails to see why “kind letters” and “expressions of interest” should have poured in upon this malefactor, just as one fails to see why a young woman who shot her lover a few months later in Columbus, Ohio, should have received an ovation in the court-room. It was not even her first lover (it seldom is); but when a gallant jury had acquitted her of all blame in the trifling matter of manslaughter, “the crowd shouted its approval”; “scores of women rushed up to her, and insisted upon kissing her”; and an intrepid suitor, stimulated by circumstances which might have daunted a less mettlesome man, announced his intention of marrying the heroine on the spot.
In New York a woman murdered her lover because he refused his aid—a dastardly refusal—when her husband had cast her off. She was not only acquitted by a jury,—which was to be expected; but the husband, pleased with the turn affairs had taken, restored her to his home and his affections; and a sympathetic newspaper offered this explanation to a highly gratified public: “They are Sicilians, and in Sicily a woman may retrieve her own honour and avenge her husband’s, only by doing as this woman had done.”
Perhaps. But New York is not Sicily, our civilization is not Sicilian civilization, and our courts of law are not modelled on a Sicilian vendetta. The reporter described with all the eloquence of his craft the young wife reconciled and joyous in her husband’s arms, laughing and singing to her baby, happier than she had been at any time since her honeymoon. A pretty picture, if the shadow of a murdered man did not intrude upon it.
Our revolt from the old callous cruelty—the heart-sickening cruelty of the eighteenth century—has made us tender to criminals, and strangely lenient to their derelictions. It inspires genial visitors at Sing Sing to write about the “fine type” of men, sentenced for the foulest of crimes. It fills us all with concern lest detention prove irksome to the detained, lest baseball and well-appointed vaudeville should not sufficiently beguile the tedium of their leisure hours.
“Imprisonment alone is not
A thing of which we would complain,
And ill-conwenience is our lot,
But do not give the convick pain.”