“Down with the gallows!” is a cry not unfamiliar in America.  There is always a movement afoot to make odious the just principle; of “a life for a life”—­to represent it as “a relic of barbarism,” “a usurpation of the divine authority,” and the rest of it.  The law making murder punishable by death is as purely a measure of self-defense as is the display of a pistol to one diligently endeavoring to kill without provocation.  It is in precisely the same sense an admonition, a warning to abstain from crime.  Society says by that law:  “If you kill one of us you die,” just as by display of the pistol the individual whose life is attacked says:  “Desist or be shot.”  To be effective the warning in either case must be more than an idle threat.  Even the most unearthly reasoner among the anti-hanging unfortunates would hardly expect to frighten away an assassin who knew the pistol to be unloaded.  Of course these queer illogicians can not be made to understand that their position commits them to absolute non-resistance to any kind of aggression; and that is fortunate for the rest of us, for if as Christians they frankly and consistently took that ground we should be under the miserable necessity of respecting them.

We have good reason to hold that the horrible prevalence of murder in this country is due to the fact that we do not execute our laws—­that the death penalty is threatened but not inflicted—­that the pistol is not loaded.  In civilized countries where there is enough respect for the laws to administer them, there is enough to obey them.  While man still has as much of the ancestral brute as his skin can hold without cracking we shall have thieves and demagogues and anarchists and assassins and persons with a private system of lexicography who define murder as disease and hanging as murder, but in all this welter of crime and stupidity are areas where human life is comparatively secure against the human hand.  It is at least a significant coincidence that in these the death penalty for murder is fairly well enforced by judges who do not derive any part of their authority from those for whose restraint and punishment they hold it.  Against the life of one guiltless person the lives of ten thousand murderers count for nothing; their hanging is a public good, without reference to the crimes that disclose their deserts.  If we could discover them by other signs than their bloody deeds they should be hanged anyhow.  Unfortunately we must have a death as evidence.  The scientist who will tell us how to recognize the potential assassin, and persuade us to kill him, will be the greatest benefactor of his century.