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Show IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT JUSTIFIED. JUSTI-FIED. The question of capital punishment is slowly forcing itself to the front in affairs of public policy, and where duly considered seems to merit attention of thinking people. Four years ago the state of Colorado abolished capital punishment. The result re-sult of this Colorado legislation will, perhaps, in time, furnish data on which to base some adequate conclusions concerning con-cerning the wisdom of the legislature's action in making this penalty of murder mur-der life imprisonment. So far it can hardly be said that there has been suffi- I cient experience in Colorado to justiLV the charge made in some quarters that it was a mistake to have abolished capi- tai punishment. It is natural that in times of intense local excitement following the commission commis-sion of some unusually heinous murder the people should cry out for summary punishment of the offender, and it is not strange that public feeling should take the form of an eye for an eve. There is no doubt but that public clamor cla-mor in Colorado favors a restoration of the law of capital punishment, and yet it is safe to say that it will not be restored in the near future at least, for the people of that state are nro-t gressive in all things, and will not be 'swayed by popular prejudice until the law has been proven by experience to be a failure. The question is one that must interest all members of society, and in this connection the following passage from an address of Dr. E. N. McGilvray of Cornell University is time!:: "In the extreme case of capital min-ishment, min-ishment, it seems to be too much of a heartless paradox to say that the execution exe-cution is for the criminal's own good or in order to make him good. But I think that without the flippancy which expresses itself in the proverb, 'onlv dead Indians are good Indians, we can truly and seriously maintain that we j kill some persons to make them good. J This end, however, is not to be realized j after their death, but before it. Apart from any outlook upon a possible future life a consideration which is not pertinent per-tinent here the coming of the murderer mur-derer to himself in the prospect of the gallows, his recognition of the enormity of his offense, not against an external society, but against the interests of his better self, which, if he had only seen it, included the life and welfare of his victim; the sad, but manly, avowal that he has put himself by his act into such a position that the only way to save himself, to redeem himself, to reestablish re-establish the harmony he has so rudely marred not a harmony outside himself, him-self, but his own harmony in his ad-j ad-j justment to a social environment that enters into the very constitution of his personality all this result, I say, and nothing short of this result, will justify the shedding of a murderer's blood. The preservation of the external order may necessitate the execution, but necessi-tation necessi-tation and justification are two very different things. Into this difference, however, we cannot go at present. "Experience seems to teach us that with man constituted as he now is and we are not speaking of what Mr. Spencer Spen-cer calls 'the straight man,' 'an ideal Social being,' for we know none such, and could not recognize him if we did experience seems to show that the only way in which the murderer can be brought to himself is by the instrumentality instrumen-tality of the death penalty. "But while all this is true, it is also true that the callousness of a certain class of persons toward the criminal is inhumane. From the time that the sentence sen-tence of death is passed, some men seem to regard the convict as a person to be brought to recognize the meaning mean-ing of his deed and of his execution, I but as a dangerous animal kept for I slaughter. It is just such an attitude that has led by reaction to the hysterically hys-terically tender-hearted . treatmen of the criminal. Both extremes should be .voided." . |