The more attention one gives to the punishment of death, the more he will be inclined to adopt the opinion of Beccaria—that it might be disused.
Jeremy Bentham: “Theory of Legislation.”
I have long gone about with a conviction that Sir Henry Wotton was right when he said that “hanging was the worst use man could be put to.” Not that I think he ever thrashed out the pros and cons of the matter in his mind, but being, as Dr. Ward says, a man of noble purposes and high thoughts, whose qualities united into “the amalgam of a true English gentleman,” he knew instinctively that the thing was repellent to his nature, and therefore it followed that it was economically unsound and morally wrong. Being a courtier, he pretended that the sentiment was that of the Duke of Buckingham, and being a man of humour he invested his Grace’s thought in an epigram. And for my part, though the judgment is some three hundred years old it is the last word on the subject. Dr. Johnson, who, whatever greater qualities he possessed, was not a gentleman—or to be more accurate, perhaps, was on occasion “no gentleman”—was wont to express
himself wittily on the subject of hanging, for, as he said, “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” In like manner, in the true conservative spirit, he inveighed against the abolition of the good old days of Tyburn. “The age is running mad after innovation; all the business of the world is to be done in a new way; Tyburn itself is not safe from the fury of innovation. No, Sir, (said he eagerly,) it is not an improvement: they object that the old method drew together a number of spectators. Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators they don’t answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the publick was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?”
Of course the old fellow was only pulling young Boswell’s leg. These were not his real opinions at all. Thanks to Dr. Birkbeck Hill, one can always study the varying philosophy of Dr. Johnson with his pen in his hand, and Dr. Johnson with his tongue in his cheek.
Johnson, the man of letters, “the strong and noble man” in an essay in the Rambler, gives us his real, earnest, sincere thoughts on the sentence of death. “It may be observed that all but murderers have, at their last hour, the common sensations of mankind pleading in their favour. They who would rejoice at the correction of a thief are shocked at the thought of destroying him. His crime shrinks to nothing
compared with his misery, and severity defeats itself by exciting pity.”
In that last phrase it seems to me that the great man puts his finger upon the real objections to the death sentence from the public point of view. The pity that should be bestowed upon the victim is poured out in muddy sentimentalism at the foot of the scaffold. The sentence of death, “of dreadful things the most dreadful,” surrounds its victim with a halo in the morbid, popular mind that blacks out the sense of the crime and cruelty for which the murderer is to be punished.
It is curious how little interest is taken in the subject of the death sentence to-day. On many a question of sociology the best that has yet been said has been said many generations ago. When Cesare Bonesana Marchese di Beccaria published his “Dei Delitti e delle Pene” in 1764 the world was thirsting to read what was to be said scientifically about crime and punishment, and the book actually caused the abolition of many death sentences in several European countries. For a book to cause any reform whatever sounds to-day like a miracle.
And, indeed, it almost seems as though since the eighteenth century the pendulum has swung back again towards the Old Testament view of things. In this matter of capital punishment the modern authorities are more disciples of Moses than of the Apostles. They cry out, “Eye for eye, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for