Society has provided laws for the protection of all men. The man who amongst us should assume the right of judgment, and take the law into his own hands, would thus violate it, and fall under the jurisdiction of those whom society has appointed to try, and to condemn.
We are not without a hope that at some future time, as civilisation advances, men will allow that they who deprive a culprit of that life which none can recall, commit an act of sacrilege in defiance of those divine laws which govern the universe and take precedence of all human decrees.
A time will come, we would fain believe, when our laws may spare the life of a guilty man, and suffer him to atone for his errors or his crimes by repentance. Such a law would respect the life which can never be restored; and while another exists which casts an irretrievable stain upon our honour, there would be a law of restoration capable of raising the man sanctified by repentance to the dignity which punishment would have prevented his attaining.
“There is more joy in heaven,” says the gospel, “over a sinner who repents, than a righteous man made perfect.” Why then are not human laws a counterpart of these divine decrees?
Now, however, liberty is the only boon which society confers upon him whose misfortunes or whose crimes have deprived him of it.
Misfortunes did we not say? Is there not in truth a law which assimilates the criminal with the upright though insolvent debtor, and compels him to the same fate in prison?
So much for this subject. Let us now return to the lynch law of the desert. It was before a tribunal without appeal, and in the presence of self-constituted judges, that Don Antonio de Mediana was about to appear. A court assembled in a city, with all its imposing adjuncts, could not have surpassed in solemnity the assizes which at this moment were convoked in the desert, where three men represented human justice armed with all its terrors!
We have described the singular and fantastic aspect presented by the spot, in which this scene was to be enacted. In truth, the sombre mountains, veiled in mist, the mysterious subterranean sounds, the long tufts of human hair agitated by every breath of wind, the skeleton of the Indian horse exposed to view, all combined to endue the place with a strange unearthly appearance in the eyes of the prisoner, so that he almost believed himself under the influence of some horrible dream.
One might have imagined himself suddenly transported into the middle ages, in the midst of some secret society, where previous to the admission of the candidate, were displayed all the terrors of the earth, as a means of proving his courage.
All this however was here a fearful reality.