III

The New Woman is against the death penalty, naturally, for she is hot and hardy in the conviction that whatever is is wrong.  She has visited this world in order to straighten things about a bit, and is in distress lest the number of things be insufficient to her need.  The matter is important variously; not least so in its relation to the new heaven and the new earth that are to be the outcome of woman suffrage.  There can be no doubt that the vast majority of women have sentimental objections to the death penalty that quite outweigh such practical considerations in its favor as they can be persuaded to comprehend.  Aided by the minority of men afflicted by the same mental malady, they will indubitably effect its abolition in the first lustrum of their political “equality.”  The New Woman will scarcely feel the seat of power warm beneath her before giving to the assassin’s “unhand me, villain!” the authority of law.  So we shall make again the old experiment, discredited by a thousand failures, of preventing crime by tenderness to caught criminals.  And the criminal uncaught will treat us to a quantity and quality of crime notably augmented by the Christian spirit of the new regime.

IV

As to painless execution, the simple and practical way to make them both just and expedient is the adoption by murderers of a system of painless assassinations.  Until this is done there seems to be no call to renounce the wholesome discomfort of the style of executions endeared to us by memories and associations of the tenderest character.  There is, I fancy, a shaping notion in the observant mind that the penologists and their allies have gone about as far as they can safely be permitted to go in the direction of a softer suasion of the criminal nature toward good behavior.  The modern prison has become a rather more comfortable habitation than the dangerous classes are accustomed to at home.  Modern prison life has in their eyes something of the charm and glamor of an ideal existence, like that in the Happy Valley from which Rasselas had the folly to escape.  Whatever advantages to the public may be secured by abating the rigors of imprisonment and inconveniences incident to execution, there is this objection:  it makes them less deterrent.  Let the penologers and philanthropers have their way and even hanging might be made so pleasant and withal so interesting a social distinction that it would deter nobody but the person hanged.  Adopt the euthanasian method of electricity, asphyxia by smothering in rose-leaves, or slow poisoning with rich food, and the death penalty may come to be regarded as the object of a noble ambition to the bon vivant, and the rising young suicide may go and kill somebody else instead of himself, in order to receive from the public executioner a happier dispatch than his own ’prentice hand can assure him.