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Show Going Back To Brutality Great is American statecraft! Texas' liegislature is considering a measure to re-establish public hangings, abolishing abol-ishing electrocution. The author of the measure informs that private executions fail to deter potential murderers. If public brutality deters, why stop half way on ths return re-turn to barbarism? Public hangings may become ordinary, commonplace, tame affairs, without any deterrent effects and, logically viewing the matter, there must be more horror and torture in the executions. There's the good old-fashioned heathen Chinese method of cutting off the limbs at the joints. The Tartars saw deterrent effects in impaling a man, there being hours of deterrent agony before death. Then, too, there was the old Apache way of slowly roasting alive at the stake, while the women and children cut strips of flesh from the subject. Texas civilization may be slipping away from legalized murder in which there is an element of mercy in a quick finish of the agony and toward a method that will harden the people to brutality. But, really, there would be nothing deterrent de-terrent in such method. Harden folks to brutality and they will be brutal. Once accustomed to public executions by law, how long will it be before Texas people come to look with indifference in-difference upon private executions, lynchings? Such one certain effect of catering to the morbid curiosity of the brutally minded. The mob cried, "Crucify him!" Ho said, "They knonot what they do." They didn't know that they were brutalizing themselves, for one thing. |