A Thought From An Occurrence of Yesterday

image 1image 2image 3image 4cropped image 1

A THOUGHT FROM AN OCCURRENCE OF YESTERDAY.

Some years since, there was quite a discussion of the pro and con of capital punishment.—Should one who took life, have his life taken? Should there be indeed “blood for blood”?—Has not society advanced far enough, at least in the established settlements of modern civilization, to dispense with the gallows?

In a comparatively rude state, where the selfish, the destructive, the combative, must be summarily met—where the epidermis of the people is tough, and does not respond to gentle admonitions—there, the case easily settles in justification of hanging. Murderers, and other criminals, must be put out of the way without ceremony. There is no time to dally about it.

Then the Biblical argument. The Old Testament is clear for the life of him who has taken life—and, indeed, demands the same penalty for the commission of many very trivial offences, some of them violations of small religious notions, &c. But the New Testament is just as clear the other way. The leading spirit, and the recorded letter, of all the Christian Gospels, are definite against all forms of capital punishment.

When one comes to think of it a moment, without passion and without bias, there is something indescribably sad—we may say, monstrous! in the fact, in a great swarming city like New York, of the deliberate bringing of the whole moral power of man, and an imposing array of physical power, to the legal choking of a poor wretch, by the noose and drop!

Such was the scene presented yesterday. While Broadway was in full tide of excitement, show and fashion—while “down town” was steeped to its neck in jobbing, shaving, stocks, and loading and unloading cargoes—while the streets in every direction were crowded with carts, trucks, and stages—a very different scene was that in the Centre-street prison. There a miserable, half-crazy nigger, enveloped in a white shroud, was taken in the midst of a procession of officers from his cell, and, with pinioned arms, swung off into eternity.

The sun shone brightly, and people by thousands laughed, talked, ate, drank, and promenaded, unwitting of the execution. Yet it was the most profound and solemn fact in the midst of the city.

Perhaps the reader asks: Would you, then, have had that black murderer pardoned, or his sentence commuted to imprisonment for life? We confess we are unable to answer the question—we are not the man’s judges.

It seems to be one of the intuitions, that what is violently destructive of human life, shall be violently destroyed. This, applied to the murderer, seems to arise and prevail among all nations, all times. Is it eternal? Or is it to be melted away by the all-humanising influence of the philanthropic spirit—and by realising that every criminal is also a fellow creature with the best of the rest—and also how the foundations of crimes are laid long and long before they are committed?