that there have been envy and jealousy in high places; that there have been treacherous and lying platforms; that there have been shallow compromises and degrading concessions to popular errors; but, amid all these disturbances, amid all these contests, amid all these inexplicable aberrations, the path of the nation has been steadily onward.

At the beginning of our second century we have entered upon a new social and political movement whose results can not be predicted, but which are certain to be infinitely momentous. That the progress will be upward I have no doubt. Through the long and desolate tract of history, through the seemingly aimless struggles, the random gropings of humanity, the turbulent chaos of wrong, injustice, crime, doubt, want, and wretchedness, the dungeon and the block, the inquisition and the stake, the trepidations of the oppressed, the bloody exultations and triumph of tyrants,—

The uplifted ax, the agonizing wheel,

Luke's iron crown and Damien's bed of steel,

the tendency has been toward the light. Out of every conflict some man or sect or nation has emerged with higher privileges, greater opportunities, purer religion, broader liberty, and greater capacity for happiness; and out of this conflict in which we are now engaged I am confident finally will come liberty, justice, equality; the continental unity of the American republic, the social fraternity and the industrial independence of the American people.

AGAINST CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

BY ROBESPIERRE

The news having been brought to Athens that Athenian citizens had been sentenced to death in the town of Argos, the people hastened to the temples to implore the gods to divert the Athenians from thoughts so cruel and so baleful. I come to urge, not the gods, but the legislators, who should be the organ and the interpreters of the eternal laws the Divinity has dictated to men, to strike from the French code the laws of blood, which command judicial murder— which are repugnant to their habits and their new Constitution. I will prove to them: First, that the death penalty is essentially unjust; secondly, that it is not the most repressive of punishments, and that it increases crimes much more than it prevents them.

Outside of civil society, let an inveterate enemy attempt to take my life, or, twenty times repulsed, let him again return to devastate the field my hands have cultivated. Inasmuch as I can only oppose my individual strength to his, I must perish or I must kill him, and the law of natural defense justifies and approves me. But in society, when the strength of all is armed against one single individual, what principle of justice can authorize it to put him to death? What necessity can there be to absolve it? A conqueror who causes the death of his captive enemies is called a barbarian! A man who causes a child that he can disarm and punish, to be strangled, appears to us a monster! A prisoner that society convicts is at the utmost to that society but a vanquished, powerless, and harmless enemy. He is

before it weaker than a child before a full-grown man.

Therefore, in the eyes of truth and justice, these death scenes which it orders with so much preparation are but cowardly assassinations-solemn crimes committed, not by individuals, but by entire nations, with due legal forms. However cruel, however extravagant these laws may be, be not astonished. They are the handiwork of a few tyrants; they are the chains with which they load down humankind; they are the arms with which they subjugate them! They were written in blood! "It is not permitted to put to death a Roman citizen"-this was the law that the people had adopted; but Sulla conquered and said: "All those who have borne arms against me deserve death." Octavius, and the companions of his misdeeds, confirmed this law.

Under Tiberius, to have praised Brutus was a crime worthy of death. Caligula sentenced to death those who were sacrilegious enough to disrobe before the image of the emperor. When tyranny had invented the crimes of lèsemajesté (which might be either trivial acts or heroic deeds), he who should have dared to think that they could merit a lighter penalty than death would himself have been held guilty of lèse-majesté.

When fanaticism, born of the monstrous union of ignorance and despotism, in its turn invented the crimes of lèse-majesté against God-when it thought, in its frenzy, to avenge God himself-was it not obliged to offer him blood and to place him on the level of the monsters who called themselves his images? The death penalty is necessary, say the partizans of antiquated and barbarous routine! Without it there is no restraint strong enough against crime. Who has told you so? Have you reckoned with all the springs through which penal laws can act upon human

sensibility? Alas! before death how much physical and moral suffering can not man endure!

The wish to live gives way to pride, the most imperious of all the passions which dominate the heart of man. The most terrible punishment for social man is opprobrium; it is the overwhelming evidence of public execration. When the legislator can strike the citizens in so many places and in so many ways, how can he believe himself reduced to employ the death penalty? Punishments are not made to torture the guilty, but to prevent crime from fear of incurring them.

The legislator who prefers death and atrocious punishments to the mildest means within his power outrages public delicacy, and deadens the moral sentiment of the people he governs, in a way similar to that in which an awkward teacher brutalizes and degrades the mind of his pupil by the frequency of cruel chastisements. In the end, he wears and weakens the springs of government, in trying to bend them with greater force.

The legislator who establishes such a penalty renounces the wholesome principle that the most efficacious method of repressing crimes is to adapt the punishments to the character of the various passions which produce them, and to punish them, so to speak, by their own selves. He confounds all ideas, he disturbs all connections, and opposes openly the object of all penal laws.

The penalty of death is necessary, you say? If such is the case, why have several nations been able to do without it? By what fatality have these nations been the wisest, the happiest, and the freest? If the death penalty is the proper way to prevent great crimes, it must then be that they were rarer with these people who have adopted and

See

extended it. Now, the contrary is exactly the case. Japan: nowhere are the death penalty and extreme punishments so frequent; nowhere are crimes so frequent and atrocious. It is as if the Japanese tried to dispute in ferocity the barbarous laws which outrage and irritate them. The republics of Greece, where punishments were moderate, where the death penalty was either very rare or absolutely unknown-did they produce more crimes or less virtues than the countries governed by the laws of blood? Do you believe that Rome was more disgraced by heinous crimes when, in the days of her glory, the Porcian Law had abolished the severe punishments applied by the kings and by the decemvirs, than she was under Sulla, who had revived them, and under the emperors who exerted their rigor to a degree in keeping with their infamous tyranny? Has Russia suffered any upheaval since the despot who governs her suppressed entirely the death penalty, as if he wished to expiate by that act of humanity and philosophy the crime of keeping millions of men under the yoke of absolute power?

Listen to the voice of justice and of reason; it cries to us that human judgments are never certain enough to warrant society in giving death to a man convicted by other men liable to error. Had you imagined the most perfect judicial system; had you found the most upright and enlightened judges there will always remain some room for error or prejudice. Why interdict to yourselves the means of reparation? Why condemn yourself to powerlessness to help oppressed innocence? What good can come of the sterile regrets, these illusory reparations you grant to a vain shade, to insensible ashes? They are the sad testimonials of the Darbarous temerity of your penal laws. To rob the man of