INTRODUCTION TO ARGUMENTS
AGAINST CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
Why is it that as we begin the 21st century, there still exist some states that possess the sanction to kill certain of its members? Apologists for capital punishment are moved by various arguments, some by the old adage, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." They see a penalty of murder for one who murders as a just punishment. Others see it as a way to protect society from further harm at the hands of the murderer, whether that be physical harm or the economic harm of having to house this individual perhaps for the rest of his or her life. Finally, the last major argument deals with the psychological nature of individuals in the society, that being that capital punishment is a deterrent against murder. Again, for the security of society, certain members of society need to be scared so as not to allow their worse natures to triumph and cause them to commit murder. Although none of these arguments are particularly compelling to the mindful man, they do seem to hold sway over a sizeable portion of the population including more than a few intellectually gifted individuals. How then do we bring a state of mindfulness to those looking at the question of capital punishment?
It is very easy to demonize a stranger, see him as less that human, and consequently wish the demon dead. It is less easy to demonize a family member or friend since you know them too well, can see and understand the creativity and goodness, albeit sometimes still latent for the most part, that he or she can offer to society. Most of us do not have to ever deal with a murderer either from the point of view of a family member or as a member of the victim's family. Mr. Lewis E. Lawes was at one time the Warden of Sing Sing Prison. He dealt with murderers on death row on a daily basis. In a short article titled "Capital Punishment" he outlines how the courage of one prisoner in particular brought home to him how wrong Capital Punishment was. It is probably the case that some are born with a sense that Capital Punishment is wrong, others come to learn it by possibly having a family member put to death, and still others never come to possess this sensibility at all. How do we argue to those who do not share this sensibility the case against Capital Punishment?
The prominent American Lawyer, Clarence Darrow, wades into this debate with a look at the whole question of justice. In his address titled "Anti-Capital Punishment", he wrestles before his audience with the question of what is a just punishment for a given crime. As everyone's sense of justice is obviously different, and as we cannot possibly know the soul of another person, it would seem that it would be wise to err on the side of caution, especially if there is some Universal Law upon which our own sensibility is founded. After all, if we transgress Universal Law every time we kill, no matter what the seeming justification may be, then society may be digging itself into a deeper hole every time someone is executed in the name of justice. Some people claim to know these Universal Laws in whole or in part and point to this or that holy book as justification for their stance. How do we respond to this type of argument?
The pastor E. L. Rexford in an article printed in 1897 in Theosophy tries to tackle this type of argument. In his article, "Capital Punishment", Pastor Rexford argues for a type of spiritual evolution for Man and Society. There are many so-called laws found in the Bible that jar our moral sensibilities and no thoughtful individual would argue that we should return to them just because they are written in the Bible. It would seem then that there are some issues that as a society we are agreed upon and others that are still up for debate. Over time society learns its lessons and comes to have a body of knowledge about which it is fairly certain, while grappling with new issues.
Thus far we have been dealing with familiar world-views, but if our object is to find the Truth about Capital Punishment, perhaps for some it would be beneficial to look at other world views.
The Spiritual Scientist in 1874 printed an article that introduced a different angle by which to view the whole debate on Capital Punishment. In "Spiritualism and Capital Punishment", it is asked what happens to the criminal's soul that is violently ripped from its physical housing, and is it possible that this act may have measurable effects on the well-being of the society perpetrating this deed. The Theosophist, Dr. Franz Hartmann, along with making short work of arguments in favor of Capital Punishment, takes the observations of the Spiritualist and puts them into the context of a spiritual philosophy. By looking at the many principles that go together in making up a human being and by looking at certain universal laws, Franz Hartmann shows in his article, "Capital Punishment", how this murderous assault on the person of the criminal is at the same time an assault on society itself. Finally, William Q. Judge adds to Hartmann's argument by painting for us a picture of what we can plausibly expect from the still active astral soul of the executed criminal in his article, "Theosophy and Capital Punishment".
It may be that many of us do not believe in karma, astral and spiritual principles, or influences from the violently killed, but this does not make these things untrue. There are many truths that we are not aware of or choose not to believe and yet these truths continue working with or without that belief. If we are more motivated by fear than compassion, then if we are willing to put a man to death out of fear that he may murder again, despite there being no guarantee that he would, then perhaps despite the lack of a guarantee that an executed murderer might influence others to murder, we may out of fear decide to keep the man locked up for the rest of his days. It seems that with or without belief, we should possess enough compassion to look upon the murderer as we would a brother and allow that brother to live out his life so that he might be able to manifest some of that latent goodness that exists in all of us and make for himself a better soul and for the world a better citizen. This would seem to be the godly thing to do.
ARTICLES
Mr. Lewis E. Lawes, Warden of Sing Sing Prison, writing in "Collier's Weekly," the well-known American newspaper, would, judging by the following, have made an interesting witness at the meetings of the Committee on Capital Punishment, the report of which will be issued in a few weeks' time.
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"It's hard to see a young man die. My duty has obliged me to carry out the execution of one hundred and twenty-nine men and one woman. The electrocution of one young man stands out as the bravest and most poignant memory of all," writes Mr. Lawes.
"His crime had been one of passion: he had killed the girl who had scorned him. He came of a good, self-respecting family, a clerk with a record for industry and honesty in his employment. He was handsome and of athletic build and only twenty-three years old.
"I came to like this lad because he had no friends, was reconciled to his fate, quietly professed his continuing love for the girl he had slain, deeply regretted the act, and recognized his sentence was just.
"During his six months' confinement in the death house--the automatic interval between conviction and confirmation of sentence by the State Court of Appeals--he had displayed none of the moody bitterness of the average condemned man. If not cheerful, he had been pleasant. We of the prison who could reach beneath the surface of a man's conduct knew this boy had courage. Three men went before him to the chair, and he gave them words of comfort without reviling the State that sent them there. That's a sign of self-control.
"The day before he was to die he asked the death-house guard if I could see him. When I went to his cell I found him unusually tense.
" 'Warden,' he said in a low whisper so that his cell-neighbours couldn't hear, 'I don't think I'm going to do so well tomorrow night when the time comes.'
" 'You've borne up bravely,' I answered. 'Don't give way now.'
" 'I've had to struggle, Warden.' he said. 'Watching other boys go by this cell toward the outer cell where they wait for the chair--that hasn't been easy. Somehow, I feel I'm slipping.'
" 'You'll have the chaplain at your side. Let me bring you a book or two to read.'
" 'No, thanks, Warden. But you can do something else for me.'
" 'Anything that the rules allow.'
" 'Warden,' he touched his forehead as if tipping an absent hat. 'you can do me a favour if you'll give me a stiff drink of whisky just ten minutes before they take me.'
" 'That's a bit against the rules, son,' I replied.
" 'It's all I ask, Warden,' he pleaded. 'I want to bear up to the end. Just one stiff drink.'
"I hesitated. His eyes were unutterably anxious.
" 'All right, son,' I said. 'You'll have your drink.'
"After dusk the next evening, mindful of my promise, I went to the infirmary and secured from the doctor a two-ounce bottle which I filled with pure rye whisky. I slipped this in my pocket, a trifle uncertain. By strict rule we never give stimulants of any kind to a condemned prisoner on his way to death. But I'd made my promise and I liked the boy.
"When I faced him thirty minutes before he was to die, he whispered:
" 'Did you bring the drink?'
"I nodded. Then, for the first time in my experience, the sight of a man going to his death gave me qualms, nausea. He was young, virile, brave. It seemed sacrilege that so very soon this stalwart, clear-eyed youth would become a corpse.
"My mood must have been reflected in my face. The young man scanned me. Just before the walk to the chair down a narrow concrete path to the green door behind which twelve of his peers, including the district attorney who had prosecuted him and the judge who had pronounced his doom, sat to witness his death, I stepped close to him, so that nobody saw me. I passed him the tiny bottle of whisky.
"He smiled. Took a step aside. As the Guards turned to cover him he passed back the bottle.
" 'You need this worse than I, Warden,' he said. 'Please drink it.'
"I did, and he went to his death--smiling.
"If you ask me what society gained by putting that young man to death, I am frankly puzzled. Very little, I think, because the crime he committed has been repeated scores of times since his execution, which, like all executions, is supposed to act as a deterrent, if there is any logic at all in capital punishment . . . .
"We know by every means of reckoning that the death penalty does not deter any more than the penalty of life imprisonment. Indeed, the latter is probably more effective when rigidly enforced.
"Since penology begins where the police leave off it is not my part to discuss the vital importance of quick visitation of the law on criminals as the most wholesome preventive of crime. But the death penalty induces more often remorse than repentance; and the institution of the death-house in a prison has a sickly, unwholesome effect. Society may not care a rap about that, which is a symptom of what is wrong with our social order." [RETURN TO INTRODUCTION]
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The Star, Volume II, No. 6, June 1929
Edited by Marie Russak Hotchener, Hollywood California
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Anti-Capital Punishment
By Clarence Darrow
I AM going to talk about what we call crime and punishment, especially capital punishment. Of course, there is nobody here that knows much about crime because you are none of you criminals. Criminals are different from other people. The individual is always good, and the criminal is the other fellow who doesn't do just what we do or think just what we do.
There are various degrees of guilt, of course. I presume, if the question were put to the people of the United States tonight, there would be some people for capital punishment, for taking a drink.
In Michigan it is life imprisonment, not for one drink, but for four!
Some think that robbery should be more seriously punished than anything else; other people think adultery should be a capital offense--for other people. There are people who think stealing should be a capital offense--unless you steal a great deal, and then you should be crowned as one of the great financiers of the greatest nation on the face of the earth!
Nobody seems to know what is the right punishment for anything. The person being punished, and the person giving it, would always disagree, and people generally would always disagree. The law confesses that it doesn't know. I have lived all my life in courts, and I know nothing whatever about justice! I haven't the slightest idea what the word means--neither has anybody else.
If you steal, does it matter the amount of money that you take? Clearly not. People earn punishment no matter what the limit of "taking," and what is a great deal of money to some people is a very small amount to someone else. Does it make any difference from whom you steal? For instance: would it be any worse to take the last penny from somebody who needed it to keep himself alive? Would it be any worse to take ten dollars which would be all that stood between him and absolute poverty, or to take the same amount from Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. Morgan? Does anybody know which would be the worst? I never found it out.
Does anybody know how to compare the guilt of cheating somebody by a lying advertisement, and picking his pockets in an open, decent way? I know which is the safest, but I don't know which is the worst! Does anybody know the comparative degree of guilt between robbery and forestalling the market, so that you can take all that a man has? The law doesn't know it, nobody knows anything about it! Does anybody know the comparative iniquity between bigamy and breach of promise--marrying too many wives or too few? I don't even know which is the more uncomfortable! Does anybody know the difference between killing a man who has fifty years of usual life before him, or killing somebody who is going to die the next day? It isn't based on the fact that killing is killing, because if it were the whole population of the State of New York would be murderers, for everybody is engaged in that business, if it is based upon the simple fact of killing. Is there anybody that knows how to proportion guilt to each man's responsibility? Of course, I make a clean sweep of the question by saying that no one is responsible; that everybody is played upon by all the forces of nature as they attune themselves to their own physical being and act in accordance with the strictest motives; that life is life, and they can't act in any other way.
Can anybody show that a human being acts from any different motive than any other animal? They may, by being frightened, have more power. Is there anyone who can tell anything about justice? Is a man who is very intelligent any more guilty or less guilty than a person who is weak and poor and a moron? Is there any way of knowing? Should culpability be greater in the fat man or the lean man? You might just as well ask, should it be greater against the tall man, the old man, or the young man. If a man is going to die anyhow in a week, is it a lesser crime for the state to hang him than it would a young man who had a whole life before him? People may know something about some things, but as for justice--we don't even know what the word means.
Is a boy who never had an education, who never had a chance, who was brought up in the street, who was taught to be a thief as we call it, just as guilty as some other boy who went to school? Is it just to hold him to the same degree of responsibility as that of the person who has had every opportunity in the world? Nobody can begin to conceive what it means. How much does it include? Does it include your own life with what you have made of yourself by the chances you had, or should it not include the father and the mother responsible for your health, and all or any number of your forebears back to Adam or in that vicinity?
Is it any credit to a man who has plenty of money not to steal? Does he know anything about what he would do if he couldn't get a living any other way?
Is it well for me, a lawyer who would not be satisfied with wages, to condemn somebody who can't practice law, and had no other trade but burglary? Can a dwarf be held to the same degree of responsibility as to his strength that you would place in a giant; and can the dwarf intellectually be held to the same degree of responsibility as a giant intellectually; and can the man who in a certain sense can go as he pleases (which simply means he can go as he wants to go and every road good), can he be held in such responsibility as the person who in every way he takes, he loses? These are the criminals.
I have lived in courts a long time. I have known all kinds of men. I could not define the word "criminal," except as some man who gets caught and convicted--then I know, only because the law defines it. I can't say a criminal is better or worse. Many times many of them perform acts of the highest courage, of the truest loyalty, of the greatest self-effacement, which some good people are incapable of. For instance:
Not long ago there was a man named O'Connor in Chicago. He had been in the penitentiary for burglary and was arrested on the streets, and there are better places to arrest people than the streets--especially Chicago streets. He was tried for murder and acquitted. He was finally tried and convicted--sentenced to death. (I don't want anyone to think I defended him that last time.) He was to be hanged on Friday, which is an unlucky day to the fellow who is going to be hanged. On Wednesday before the hanging he made some arrangements with some guards, honest men in charge of the jail. (All the fellows who send people to jail are honest, all the fellows who get in are crooks. That is the only way we have of knowing.) Well, this man made secret connections with the outside world and had an automobile at the foot of the stairway, or at the street, at 12 o'clock. The guards were honest, they took their wage money and kept their word. That is at least as good a definition of honesty as I know anything about. Several other prisoners were escaping at the same time. O'Connor led them down the stairs, down to the street; the automobile was there--he could be saved. The guards who wanted to hang the fellow were right behind him, trying to stop his escape. The man next to O'Connor, who was escaping with him, slipped on the sidewalk, fell, and broke his leg. O'Connor had already reached the automobile, but turned back in the face of the pursuers, grabbed this fallen man, took him in his arms to take him along. But the crook who was hurt said: "You go ahead, leave me alone--I have got to hang--leave me alone and get away!"--which he finally had to do. What a kind fellow O'Connor was, anyway! Many people in this audience would have wanted him caught and hanged. I don't know anybody in Chicago who did, and I am glad he hasn't been.
There is not any emotion in a man we call a criminal that is not in all of us. Sometimes certain emotions are stronger and others are weaker, and the balance is not the same. What is more important than all the rest is that the network of circumstances that surround a life is never the same. It not only takes an inclination but an inducing cause to commit any crime, but there is not anything in any of us that is not in some degree in all of us.
Probably a good many of you people have never killed anybody, but how many of you have not been secretly hoping to read the obituary notices of someone you wished dead? I have. Everybody is filled with various emotions. The balance and the counterbalance wavers. We are played on by all the outside circumstances in life. What happens to me depends upon these forces that play on me--the conflicting emotions of life. They happen to me inevitably.
The cruelest doctrine we have was invented by religious men and misfits in general. The cruelest doctrine is free-will; for no man can do as he pleases, can control his life, which really means controlling the universe. Is a man stronger than the universe? How many people glow at the news item that some person is to be executed tomorrow! Yet how many have the slightest capacity or inclination to put themselves in the condemned person's place? And unless you can do that, you can't tell anything about it. If you can do it, there is no danger of your judging them. But understanding means that you cannot judge; it just means you understand, that is all.
So when these judges (who get their political function through the appointments of governors), talk about justice, they are talking about something that no human being knows anything whatever about. There are some things we do know about: we know about the emotion of kindliness, we know about sympathy, we know about charity, we know about human understanding--but what do you suppose I know about judging any one of you? I would have to put myself inside of you, to be you. We never knew anybody to do anything that he could not give a reason for. Sometimes they might not be satisfactory reasons to me, but they were all satisfactory to him; therefore, I object to this whole question of capital punishment.
There are men who know something about the criminal forces that move human life, and try to bring the right influences to play on a child, even beginning at two years old and continuing until he grows up, and try to see that the right opportunities of life come to him; but the average person never thinks of the criminal, until they want to kill him or send him to prison for some overt act. Many of them the State, in its organized capacity, never even hears of until it puts them to death. That is all that it has ever done for them in any way. It is generally, almost always, the strongest, most powerful, wealthiest, and most respectable who are the first to judge them.
Now, we will talk first for a few moments about crime in general. What do we know about it? What is it, anyhow? Probably there have been more people put to death for witchcraft and heresy than for all other crimes put together. Judges administer the most serious punishments for the things that they themselves hate the most. Such judgment hasn't anything to do with any other kind of responsibility, but just the things that they hate the most. All through the world people have hated the man who doesn't believe in the same religion that they do. In the past they put them to death in the most horrible way. No punishment was hard enough. They didn't hang them in a clean, painless way, but boiled them in oil, quartered them, cut them to pieces, or threw them to wild beasts. Witchcraft, of course, has claimed not its hundreds but its thousands, down even to the other day in Pennsylvania. The only trouble about that recent extreme sentence was that it should have gone to the judge. Sending a fourteen-year-old boy to the penitentiary because he believed in witchcraft, when everybody else believes in it! There are many kinds that I know of, and people believe in some kind or other.
The greatest witchcraft of all is the common idea that society is preserved by punishing people -- jails, penitentiaries, gallows, guarding forces, and that sort of thing. Even some of the good people in this world would, I think, if the vote were given them, sooner vote to abolish the churches than abolish the jails. They would rather depend on the jails than the churches. Of course they are strong for the jails--for other people--all of them.
It is only recently that anybody has tried to find out the causes of anything. Of course you know the sun used to go around the earth; it doesn't do it any more! And if a good prophet wanted to lengthen the days so he could kill more people, he just stopped the sun! We know now he couldn't do it that way.
It was naturally the same thing about disease; people were sent to jail for it. Of course they didn't know anything about germs, but they knew about sin. People have always known about sin. If they would stop talking about sin and talk about science, germs, eugenics, or something that really does affect people, they would get somewhere. Formerly people didn't know what a microbe was. I do. I have seen lots of them. Crazy people used to be sent to jail just for being crazy. We don't do that any more. We put them in a hospital and try to cure them. A crazy person should be sent to the hospital for ten years. If he gets well the next day, he should be let out. If he doesn't, he should be kept there until he does get well.
If you get a disease you are not to blame for it any more, unless you get it by overdrinking; but if you get it by overeating it is all right. A good share of the inhabitants do become diseased that way, for that is the only thing they can indulge in, and no longer think it is a sin to get a disease from overindulgence; but they still think it is a mortal sin to do some of the things that are forbidden by law. How do they find out what is forbidden by law? Who tells us what is right and wrong? I have had so many people tell me, and tell me so many different and contradictory things, that I got dizzy from it.
At one time witchcraft was the most terrible crime we could commit. I suppose today that not to be "one hundred per cent American" is the most terrible crime. First and last, though, the crime that is punished the most in the world is poverty. It always has been punished the most. Now, fortunately, while some people have been punished, there have been other people studying the cause of crime and wanting to know something about its mechanisms. This question, to me, is even bigger than capital punishment.
In the first place, we know that nine out of every ten of the people in jail are poor, and always have been poor. That is the reason why all the good lawyers are corporation lawyers. They want to be where everybody is honest and has the money! You don't often find good lawyers defending criminals to save them. Why not? Good sense ought to tell us there is no connection between poverty and getting into jail, but there is a lot of relation between poverty and getting out of jail.
Nine out of ten criminals never had any education. Either they were not fit for the particular education we give in schools, which means studying books which nobody cares anything about, or else they never had any chance to go to school, one or the other. Go through our penitentiaries, and you find it universally true--I don't care where you go. Then half of the criminals are morons; that is, they know less than the average person, naturally. You can imagine how little that is.
And what is still worse, all of them began the course of crime when they were small children. They didn't have anything else to do, anywhere else to go, no training, no occupation, no chance. More than nine out of ten of them may not have committed the specific crime for which they are in prison for but they began as children the career which leads inevitably to the final result. Few of them have any profession. You do not find the man in jail to be the lawyer, the bricklayer, the carpenter, or even the plumber. They wouldn't be visiting unfamiliar houses on dark nights, they would be getting a living without it; and this is the reason--first and last. Give everybody an opportunity in the world, and it is easy enough to purchase all that is necessary to satisfy his needs. Give everybody an opportunity to live comfortably, and the jails would be closed. You can't stop crime in any other way; there is no other way. Educate every person so he can make a living and give him opportunities to make the conditions of life comfortable, then you will get rid of all crime--at least nine-tenths of it. There are some crimes that come from other reasons, but most of them have their roots in poverty, and in the poor man's lack of opportunity. Everybody who has studied the question knows this, and every jail and every penitentiary in the land is proof of it. There are some crimes of passion--husbands kill wives and wives kill husbands. Divorces are expensive, and the majority of people don't believe in them. They get along bearing their own burdens and think everybody else should do the same. We have a considerable number of killings through love--or what takes its place. I don't want to define the word love--I could, but I am not going to.
Probably the largest number of killings, where the emotions have anything to do with it, are between men and women. Very few because people want to get rid of each other, outside of domestic relations. Does capital punishment help any there? Let a woman come after you with a gun once and see; some woman that you married--or haven't married--it doesn't make any difference. The fear of capital punishment doesn't affect her any. Fearing it, or hating it, is the way one feels the morning after--not at the time. After it is all over with, then one may think about it, may have time to think; but before it one has got something of more importance to think about.
In general, there are just two kinds of killers; there are a few more but not worth talking about; one is the passionate kind I spoke of. Capital punishment hasn't done anything more to prevent them than preaching has--and that is very, very little. Intellect doesn't affect them in the least, never did and never can; and when it can, then the human race will die out. For this eternal hope which we all have, and this eternal push for emotional gratification, are born with us and are a part of our human life. The very mineral life and all plant life is nothing but this. We keep the world alive, so we have got to accept the situation and do the best we can with it, and try to remove all the inducing causes that we can possibly remove: that is all we can do. Our efforts are likely to work, can't stop working, by getting criminals to make good, and to love their fellow men, because really they desire to love them. We have hated the criminals, and we have got them into a condition where they hate us because we hate them. You can only cure conditions by removing inducing causes. Unfortunately this is the last thing people in general try to do.
The great mass of killers whom we call murderers do their killing in self-defense, or to prevent arrest in case of robbery and burglary, possibly some other few reasons. The criminal does not intend to kill or want to kill; but, rather than be arrested, he kills for no other purpose than protecting his own liberty. Now let us look at this for a minute. The ideal way to deal with the matter is to get rid of the robbery and burglary by beginning with the child in his innocence, and training him to make it easier for him to live.
There are few grown people in this world with such strength of character that they would be willing to starve before they would steal. The world isn't made up of people who are that silly. Then there are the various kinds of people who might get enough to eat, but can't get a lot of other things that are the habit and the custom of the people today; these lead directly up to crime, one thing after another. People think that more things are necessary to their happiness than ever before, and they are the inducements to crime; but first and last it is the economic condition that brings these criminal things about, and you can prove it a hundred ways.
All these things have been observed by some few who are interested enough to care to know something about crime--which most don't; most people have just one recipe--to punish. To people in general it doesn't make any difference what science, or the criminologist, or the humanitarian thinks--"crucify him."
(Notes of an address made by Mr.
Darrow and reported through the
kindness of Angela F. Southard.)
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BY E. L. REXFORD, D.D., PASTOR UNIVERSALIST CHURCH, COLUMBUS,
AND EX-PRESIDENT OF BUCHTEL COLLEGE.
It is one of the barbarisms of the olden times still lingering among the benignities of our struggling civilization. It may well be called "a struggling civilization" inasmuch as the better energies of every age are always set to the task of freeing the life of its people from the irrational burdens imposed by the preceding times. A given code of opinions and usages may embody the moral, legal and religious sense of a given age, but when these opinions and practices are brought forward into a purer light and erect their standards in the midst of the more enlightened humanities they are seen as wretchedly incongruous and they shock the sensibilities of the best life. It is providential possibly that there should be this commingling of the rational and the irrational, the brute and the human.
Every age has had its "barbaric" and its "enlightened," its lower and its higher standards and laws and customs, and it seems to be one of the divine methods for increasing strength that the higher should ever battle with the lower. Life that is too easy is not compact and firmly knit in its sinews. It is opposition, it is the warfare between the old and the new to which the world is indebted for its very life. Some of the Indians of this country accounted for the strength of their chiefs by believing that the soul of every enemy slain passed into the body of the slayer, and hence if a warrior had killed an hundred men the victor had the strength of an hundred men. It was a rude way of expressing a persistent philosophy. Resistance is one of the life processes. If birth were not difficult it would be impossible. The resisting barriers of nature must hold the immature life till the hour of safe deliverance arrives. Mr. Beecher was once asked if he did not think there was a vast amount of chaff in the Bible, and he is reported to have answered: " Of course there is. But the character and value of chaff are determined by the time of the year." Quite essential to the immature grain, it is useless to the matured result. The shell resists and protects the chick till the chick is strong enough to resist the shell and needs no more protection. Resistance and life are critically balanced against each other in nature, always making their exchanges at the appointed hour and so nature always befits itself and justifies itself. But in our human economies and methods the ancient barriers are frequently allowed to remain far beyond their time, and the withered genius of conservatism is permitted an existence vastly overreaching its legitimate date. The living energies are often burdened and sometimes blighted by the ancient tyrannies, and the inheritance of the larger life is denied its rightful heirs.
I think this is true in the instance of the present and longer continuance of this barbarity of the death penalty for crime. It may have had a moral value in a rude condition, but it stalks forward out of its ancient darkness into the light of this age and appears as one of the crowning horrors of the time. That it does not hold its place as securely as it once did is evident, but it is yet too strongly intrenched in the legal and religious (!) sense of the public to inspire any eager hope of its speedy abandonment. "Society must be protected" is the reasonable demand made by our legislators and the officers intrusted with the administration of the laws, but they have not sufficient faith in the philosophy of clemency to trust the fortunes of society to milder and more humane ways. They are afraid that the ends of justice will not be attained if the death penalty is abolished. The motives of our law-makers are not to be questioned, but I am morally certain that their fears spring from false estimates of the moral elements involved.
There is another class of men who advocate the retention of the death penalty on the basis of the Bible. They claim that the Bible sanctions and indeed ordains Capital Punishment, and therefore it should be retained. The Bible is claimed to be the word of God in all things and the only authority. So did men in the days of the Anti-Slavery agitation in America advocate the retention of slavery by the authority of the Bible. Clergymen stood in their pulpits and hurled the divine anathemas at the abolitionists, and they built up a breast-work of Bibles around the institution : but in these times they have found different uses for their Bibles and different meanings in them, and not a few of even the conservative clergy are attempting to identify the once " infidel" Lincoln with the churches. The meaning of the Bible changes with the intelligence and the humanity of every age, and there is scarce a barbarism of history that has not had the Bible quoted in its defense by somebody at some time.
In regard to this subject in hand, some observing man in the ancient times seeing that violence naturally begets violence, said that "whosoever sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed;" and gradually, or it may be immediately, the fertile genius of the theologians, claiming to know the Divine mind, erected this observation into a divine command, and to-day it is one of the holy proof-texts for the law and practice of human execution. But the Bible proves too much in these lists of the death penalty. Under the Jewish code of laws there were thirty-three crimes punishable by death. This same Bible sanctioned and prescribed the death penalty for them. Do these biblical defenders of the death penalty wish to go to this limit, and would they have the Bible code enacted in our civil statutes? But why not? If the Bible sanctions the death penalty for thirty-two crimes aside from murder, why should our death-dealing Bible-worshippers select the one crime of murder for the hangman and reject all the others? If the Bible is the word of God, designed as a code of procedure for all time, why not abide by it and bring back the horrors of its ancient sanctions? No one would venture upon such an experiment, and yet the freedom with the Bible that will reject thirty-two crimes from the clutch of the hangman or the axe of the axeman may reject the thirty-third crime from the same murderous hand. The Bible is simply useless in this contention. It is loaded so heavily with this barbaric spirit that it bursts in the hands of those who use it, and it is more dangerous to those who stand behind it than to those at whom it is aimed.
Another class of men in this grim apostleship of death is composed of those who harbor a spirit of revenge, and out of whose hearts sprung the law of "an eve for an eye" and "a tooth for a tooth." They are men who seem to think of law as an instrument of destruction for the unfortunate classes instead of being an agency for their preservation, their discipline and their ultimate restoration. It is this feeling of revenge, no doubt, that has shaped a considerable part of our legislation as it bears upon the criminal class. Men of this type of advocacy are men who, according to the theory of evolution, have brought with them certain elements of the lower animalism, the tiger element which is inflamed by the sight or smell of blood, and the more blood that is shed shall be to them the signal for the shedding of more blood still. It is wholly irrational and partakes of the brute nature. Many of our legislators need to be reproduced or reincarnated on a higher level. They need to think and discuss and vote in the higher regions of the moral sensibilities. There is not a single ray of intelligence or reason whereby the region where they make their laws, is illuminated.
The researches of such men as O'Sullivan and Spear and Rantoul and Victor Hugo fail to discover a single instance where the executions of men have checked the tendencies to crime. These researches reveal precisely the reverse of this, and show as plainly that public executions have been the occasions of multiplied crimes. Prison cells out of which men have been led to execution in the morning have been filled at night by men who had committed crimes in the very shadows of the gallows during the fatal day. Public executions instead of restraining crime have stimulated it, or at least public executions have broken down the public regard for the value and inviolability of life, upon which considerations a large part of the safety of life must forever depend.
The argument has been relied upon for years in behalf of this barbarous custom, that a public hanging must exert a salutary restraint, but the abolishing of these public scandals is a virtual surrender of the argument itself. If the old argument of restraint is good, then all the people ought to be urged to witness every execution, but the simple and significant fact is that the better classes of the people shrink from such scenes while the most reckless and lawless people will gather with the greatest eagerness to witness them when permitted. Here is a circumstance that ought to invite our lawmakers to pause and consider. A legal custom that invites the enthusiasms of the worst elements in a community and revolts and horrifies the best element is a custom that ought to be abolished.
When the State is seen to hold life cheap the people will do so too. If the State in its judicial calm can take life, men in their frenzy will take it all the more readily. Judicial murder in the lists of a high civilization will yet be seen, I believe, to be more culpable and less pardonable than murder by the infuriated or crazed individual. A man, under an uncontrollable frenzy of anger takes a life and certainly should be punished; but what shall we say of a state which in its wisest and least excited moods, in its calmest deliberation, proceeds to take the life of a man whose average line of intention may be much farther removed from the murderous borders than the habitual moods of many others who may never have met with the momentary temptation to violence?
It ought to be a principle in criminal administration that no government should place one of its subjects beyond its power to benefit him if the changed spirit and mood should permit a benefit. Who can doubt that multitudes of men, the moment after committing a murder, would have given the world if they could, to recall the life destroyed and the act that destroyed it? Vast numbers of men have committed crimes who have not been criminal in their common daily moods. By the force of extraordinary influence, acting perhaps but the fatal once in a whole lifetime, they have failed. The statement needs no argument. It is manifestly true. And is it an enlightened policy, is it humane, is it just that a life so failing of its manhood for the moment shall be destroyed by the combined power of a great and enlightened state? It is barbaric to the last limit of its destruction.
The infliction of the death penalty clashes with the humanities of our times. It is an incongruous presence. To add to its incongruity we associate religion and religious ceremonies with the gallows and the chair. The "Spiritual advisers" pray and read Scripture with the doomed man--secure his repentance, pronounce him "saved," "a child of grace," prepared to take his seat in paradise and then the signal is given and the "Christia" is sent to heaven with a black cap over his face! This business of hanging Christians is a gruesome one. Either the rope or the Chaplain ought to be abolished. The Chaplain at the gallows is an anomaly. If a man has become a Christian and is prepared for the society of heaven we ought to tolerate him on earth, especially if we have the privilege of keeping him within prison restraints, as in general we ought, no doubt.
The poorest use we can make of a man is to hang him. What have we done? Have we benefitted the man? So far as we know, not at all. And are we permitted to deal with men with no thought of doing them good ? Who gave us that barbaric liberty? Shall a state assume that it may deal with its subjects with no purpose to benefit them? The thought is criminal itself. The murderous class are generally of the ignorant class, of those generally who are physically organized on a low basis. Shall the state execute those whom it has failed to educate ? Shall it kill, or restrain? Civilization can have but one answer to this question.
For the crime of murder I would have life imprisonment, except in rare instances, and these modifications should be strongly guarded by judicious pardon boards. I would punish crime without imitating it, and its object should be to establish the people in conditions in which punishment would be unnecessary. Penalties instead of being so many forms of destruction should be so many forms of help. I would seek to abate the unwholesome sympathy of the people, and especially of emotional women, in behalf of the criminal class. I would advise our young women not to be lavish with their bouquets for the criminals. At least this class of men should not be made exceptional favorites. I would advise our States not to make the prison grounds the most beautiful places within their borders as Michigan has done at Ionia. Men should know that crime means solitude and desolation. California at San Quentin has been wise, in placing her criminals on one of the loneliest islands of the sea. No burglar, ravisher or murderer should find that his crimes lead him to a paradise of beauty. Soft sentiments are not fit companions for hardened criminals, but a rugged justice and a severe mercy are the befitting attendants of crime. Men should realize that in the commission of great crimes, they have left the realms of flowers and soft sentimentalism and have arrived in the country of the burning sands and the desolate rigors of a barren existence, and they should learn that flowers do not grow in that country.
The State however should erect no impossible barriers across the way of their return. Let them come back to the regions of the enlightened and human sentiments if they will. By years of unquestioned evidence let them prove their return to the compassionate regions of the human life, where their own spirit shall but increase the volume of the benignities. Then and not till then shall they be wisely crowned, nor even then as heroes, but as returned prodigals. Then may the rings be placed upon their withered fingers, and the sandals on their bleeding feet, and the robes upon their emaciated bodies. Then may the music begin, and the dancing. Not in the far country shall they lie down on beds of roses or wear the robes of an undiscriminating love. They have courted and should wed the genius of the Desolate and should abide in her torture chambers and learn wisdom, and return to find the waiting compassions they once forsook.
There is a barbaric treatment of crime that leads to destruction. This treatment has too long prevailed; there is an enlightened treatment of crime that should lead back to life through its rigorous but merciful severities. I believe it is time for this policy to be inaugurated, time for the retirement of the ancient barbarism and the introduction of a philosophy of criminal procedure that shall take its place with the general civilization we have reached. [RETURN TO INTRODUCTION]
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[Spiritual Scientist Volume 1 December 10, 1874]
THE MEDIUMS OF BOSTON.
Suppose an individual should say, "I will become a candid investigator of Spiritualism, and visit the prominent spiritual mediums of Boston for this purpose,"--what would be the result? We thought this would be an interesting record, and shall present such an experience. The first of a series is published this week. The medium visited was Miss Nickerson,--this name being selected by chance. There are several others already in manuscript. The articles will become more interesting as they proceed; for the investigator will undoubtedly meet with some of the "mysteries of spirit control," which he will endeavor to harmonize or explain.
SPIRITUALISM AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT.
It is a singular fact,--the reader may call it a coincidence if he will, but nevertheless it is a fact patent to every close observer,--that murders and suicides at times seem epidemic. Read of one suicide and frequently it will be followed by another. So with murders: several will be chronicled in quick succession, then follows a brief respite.
Now, can we deduce from this a theory or philosophy? Is it cause and effect? One thing is noticeable,--public opinion, when once aroused, checks the frequency of these occurrences. Public sentiment says, "Thou shall do no murder." It runs through the community, and every member shares its electric influence. Spiritualists would say they are then in a positive condition, or averse to any murderous influences or feelings.
Obviously the reverse of this is the negative condition when the majority neither think nor care about those things which do not concern them directly. This negative condition is receptive, and conducive to general crime.
"Murder is in the air," is an expression, at times, with the reporters of the press,--or at least used to be. Inquest would follow murder, and murder inquest, again and again, before a trial could be finished on the first case. The columns of a daily would bear evidence to this fact for weeks at a time, and then months would go by without either a murder or a suicide.
We never could understand why this should be so, until we became somewhat familiar with Spiritualism. Is it at all unreasonable to believe that there are influences in the surroundings of an individual which draw round him closer and closer until the fatal blow is struck? Well may one say, who has witnessed the genuine surprise and remorse of a murderer, as he learns of the death of his victim, "Queer case."
And so these queer cases will continue to start up and horrify the community, or the world at large, until they become familiar with that philosophy which teaches that the spirit of man is untouched by the action of death: that the spiritual existence is an unbroken continuity of the present. Then will they see the truth of the statement, "Man in his lifetime is an omnibus carrying many passengers." Then will they believe that the spirit of the murderer, set free by the gallows, is not sent out of his relationship with this sphere, but can aid and abet, nay, worse, even instigate, a murder.
Spiritualists believe this; they arrive at such a conclusion by a logical train of reasoning. Theoretically, one premature death affects the whole world. They should therefore enter their protests against capital punishment. In justice to the man, in justice to themselves, in justice to the world, they should not hesitate to say that capital punishment is unwise, and retards the progress of society as a whole.
We record this as our belief,--That the old Mosaic laws should be superseded by Christian philosophy.
[Better yet--one must study Theosophical ideals to understand what happens to victims who die prematurely.] [RETURN TO INTRODUCTION]
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From Theosophical Siftings Volume 3, 1890, pp.3-9
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT.
WHILE a wave of spiritual enlightenment is passing over the world, calling forth various reforms in the political and social relations of humanity, there is one extremely dark spot in the mind of mankind, into which this light does not seem to be able to penetrate, namely, the idea of killing criminals for the purpose of punishing them. This idea is a superstition, arising from an entire ignorance of the true nature of man; a relic of the Dark Ages, a blot on the character of humanity. It was to be expected that in consequence of the rapid spreading of progressive ideas, disseminated by Theosophical literature, this remnant of a barbaric custom would gradually disappear. Instead of that, the Austrian lawmakers have just revised the penal code, retaining capital punishment, and, the faculty of medicine having memorialized the Minister of Justice recommending the cutting off of the heads of criminals in the place of hanging them. In the most progressive country of the world--the United States of America--legal killing by means of electricity is about to be introduced, while in other so-called civilized countries the carelessness of allowing oneself to be caught for committing a crime is punished by hanging, garrotting, shooting, or by the guillotine.
The first question which arises in the consideration of this subject is: "What is the object of killing a criminal?" The second question is, "Is that object attained?" The only imaginable objects in killing a criminal are: 1. To inflict punishment on him for having acted against the law; 2. To render him incapable to do further mischief, and thereby to protect society.
The age in which criminals were tortured has passed away; the authorities are content upon finding a way by which the death penalty can be inflicted with the least possible suffering to the delinquent; and even inflicting mental suffering upon the candidate for death is avoided, because, instead of causing him to get frightened by imagining the horrors of hell, everything is done to make him believe that his sins are forgiven, and that he will be received with open arms in the celestial kingdom. The "punishment" is, therefore, evidently not intended to produce physical or mental suffering, and if the criminal is a man of courage, and does not fear death, there will be no horror of dying, there will be no suffering, and the only possible punishment for him is the loss of his life. Now the medical fraternity inform us that as soon as the heart and the brain of a person are paralysed, there is an end to his consciousness. If this is true, then the criminal, as soon as he is killed, is unconscious of ever having lived; he is unconscious of ever having lost his life, and where, then, is the punishment in causing a man a loss of which he is not aware, and in taking away from him something that he will never miss? It is like taking away from a person something that never belonged to him, and of which he does not even know that it exists.
Seen from this point of view, capital punishment is a total failure, because, besides frightening a timid criminal for a few hours or days before his death, there is no pain inflicted upon him; and even this mental torture, if any, is not inflicted by the law, but merely by the criminal's own imagination, and by his belief regarding the state after death. The capital punishment being, therefore, merely an imaginary punishment, does not fulfil its object as a punishment, and the only remaining question is whether society can protect itself better by killing a criminal than by shutting him up in a prison and seeking to educate him and to improve his character. At a time when no convenient prisons existed, and when the only means of protecting oneself was to kill the aggressor, the killing of criminals may have appeared to be useful and necessary; but at the present state of civilization, where the country abounds with prisons, there is, to say the least, no necessity for killing an offender against the law; nor is there any financial profit arising from killing him, because, besides the cost of the execution, the Government loses his labour.
There is still another reason given by the advocates of capital punishment for its continuation, namely, the "wholesome effect which it will have of frightening other criminally-inclined people into remaining virtuous"; but it is very doubtful whether the defenders of such an argument believe it themselves, or whether they have ever seriously considered it; because it is well known that the law does actually never punish a crime unless the criminal is caught, and, therefore, the punishment is rather for having committed the crime in a bungling manner, which involved discovery, than for committing it; and the only thing which the captured criminal regrets is that he was not cunning enough to avoid being caught, and the only sincere resolve which he forms in his own mind is to be more careful the next time, so as not to be caught again. Moreover, the morality of a people which is based only upon cowardice arising from fear of punishment is worth very little, and the passions, merely restrained and pent up by fear, accumulate and grow in strength. The pent-up passions of a nation restrained by fear resemble a mine loaded with dynamite, waiting for a favourable moment to explode, when the result will be such as has been witnessed during the horrors of the French Revolution.
Thus, seen from a merely external and "materialistic" point of view, capital punishment is useless and unnecessary; but a correct conception of its true nature and consequences can only be formed if we look below the surface appearances and study the true nature of "life" and of the constitution of man.
There is nothing more irrational than the attempts which have been made by our modern "rationalists" of separating science from philosophy. In doing so, science, so-called, condemned itself of being merely a science of external appearances and phenomena, relating the causes of such eternal appearances to the region of the "unknowable." It is admitted by all modern and ancient philosophers that a tree is the result of something capable to produce a tree; i.e., of the action of some invisible principle, or "potentiality," residing in a kernel and capable to develop into a tree; and likewise that the organism of man is the result of something invisible in connection with a power whose manifestation is called "life"; but material science, in disregarding and denying the existence of causes which she cannot see with material eyes, makes of every man and of every tree a miracle whose existence cannot be explained. Occult science says that the principle which causes the appearance of a tree, or which manifests itself in the human form as a man, is the real thing of importance which is to be taken into consideration; and that the external form, be it that of a man or of a tree, is nothing else but an external form whose importance does not transcend the plane whereon it exists. She says that while the form or appearance perishes, the power which caused that form to exist remains, and will be capable, under favourable conditions, to produce another similar form, be it a man or a tree, exhibiting the same qualities as the former. There is only this difference, that while the seed of a tree may be destroyed, the spiritual "seed" which produces the soul of a man cannot be destroyed by capital punishment, but will, under favourable conditions, produce such a man again as sure as the seed of a thistle will produce nothing else but a thistle. All this is taught by the doctrine of Reincarnation, a doctrine with which our scientists ought to make themselves familiar, if they do not prefer to remain in ignorance regarding that which is of supreme importance in studying the nature of man. This doctrine, then, teaches us that, in depriving the spirit of a criminal of his physical body, we do not kill the cause that produced the criminal, and that this cause will in due time produce another criminal of the same kind, if not of a still worse character, as the unjust act of robbing him of his life will have caused a sense and desire of revenge and an embitterment of the spirit. By capital punishment we, therefore, at best, defer the manifestation of an evil cause for some future time, and give to a future generation an evil inheritance, with which we ourselves ought to have contended, and which we ought to have sought to ameliorate. This is, however, not all. It might be said that we do not care about the troubles that will affect future generations, and that it is all we can do to protect and take care of ourselves ; but a deeper investigation in the invisible nature of man will show us that in killing the body of a criminal we do not get rid of the powers that constituted him a criminal, and that these powers, after having been deprived of one instrument for their manifestation, will continue to manifest themselves in other still less convenient ways. To understand this it will be necessary to throw a glance at the constitution of man, as it is taught by those who have the capacity to know it; and for the sake of those who are not familiar with the doctrines of Occultism, we will attempt to outline that constitution in comprehensible terms. According to the doctrines of the sages, Man is a fourfold manifestation of consciousness, or, in other words, a trinity of spirit and body, with the intermediary link called the "soul," the latter being divisible into the purely animal and the divinely human soul. To the former belong the animal emotions and passions, to the latter the higher powers of the mind. We may, therefore, classify these four states of consciousness as four principles, giving them the following familiar names:
1. GOD, the Atma, the "divine Self," i.e., the Divinity in man, a universal power, existing in the majority of the criminals, only, so to say, in a dormant or latent state, and not having arrived at a state of self-consciousness in them. This means that the criminal is not a saint, and does not know the god that is hidden in him, and whom to awaken to consciousness is the object of human life, an object frustrated by the execution of the criminal. This principle, whether awakened or not, cannot be executed and killed; it is the real and true Self, and returns to its divine source after the death of the body, as is also taught by the Church, which, at the funeral service, relegates "the body to Earth, and the spirit to God."
2. The MIND. This we understand not to be the thinking faculty of the brain, but that principle which manifests itself as thought and will in the material brain, i.e., that which enables the brain to think by the aid of the physiological processes taking place in the living subject. Even if the head is cut off and the brain with which man used to think is destroyed, the thought-producing principle cannot be killed; but after being deprived of its instrument for manifestation, it enters into its own state of being, which in criminals of the ordinary kind is presumably that which is called Devachan, where it rests in its subjective condition until the time arrives when it will be reincarnated upon the earth, and evolve a new physical body with the same tendencies which it possessed in its former life.
3. The ASTRAL SOUL. It is well known that the physical body or "corpse" of a man is not the man himself, but merely an instrument formed by nature, in and through which the consciousness of man may manifest its mental and physical powers; in other words, man is not himself his own nature, but he has an ever-changing organism, in which his (temporary) nature is manifesting itself. The same is the case with his astral soul, the seat of his passions and emotions. The astral soul is not the man himself, but merely a principle wherein the good and evil powers existing on the astral plane are manifesting themselves, in the same sense as cold manifests itself in an icicle; to destroy the icicle does not destroy the cold, even if that piece of ice were broken into a thousand pieces; and if the icicle is molten and evaporated, the same cold will be able to cause the vapour to condense and to freeze into ice again. This means to say that in the astral plane of the world there exist certain influences of a good and an evil kind, comparable to miasmas in the physical atmosphere of our planet; and as those miasmas will be attracted to those who are especially susceptible for them, and cause epidemic diseases, likewise these astral influences are attracted to those animal souls in men and women where they find a congenital soil to grow and develop, just as the life principle in a cherry tree attracts from the soil and the atmosphere all that is necessary to build up a cherry tree and nothing else. The animal soul of a hardened criminal is a fruitful soil where evil astral influences are readily attracted to and developed. These evil tendencies are not the man himself; they merely belong to his nature and are acting in and through him. They cannot be killed by killing the body, but if the physical form wherein they are active is destroyed, these powers for evil are liberated and free to be attracted to and to manifest themselves in other human souls where they find points of attraction, in the same sense as the cold liberated by evaporation will cause water with which it comes into contact to freeze and crystallize. If we kill a malefactor, we liberate his own essential ego of the evil influences which had possession of him, and we enable these influences to fasten upon the souls of innocent but sensitive persons, in which they create evil inclinations and thoughts, and which may then repeat the same crime for which the criminal was executed. The world is full of such sensitive and mediumistic persons, and it is a known fact that crimes sometimes become epidemic, and that if a criminal has been executed for some especially atrocious crime, crimes of a similar nature are often heard of soon afterwards. The execution of a criminal in this respect has the same effect as pouring out a stinking fluid upon the public thoroughfare with the good intention of getting rid of the evil odour, and thereby poisoning the whole community by the (psychic) stench that was at first confined to only one place.
4. The PHYSICAL BODY. The "corpse"--the external form with its inherent life principle and "magnetic body," or "perisprit." This is merely an external instrument for the inner man, and incapable per se to do anything good or evil, unless made to act by the astral soul or the mind. It is merely an innocent victim of the natural forces acting therein, and to punish it for sins which the inner man committed through its instrumentality is like hanging a stick with which a murder has been committed, or tearing to pieces the overcoat of a thief.
If the above is taken into due consideration, it will be seen that in executing a criminal nobody is actually punished except those sensitive and innocent people who are deficient of the power of self-control, and who may become infested with the evil influences arising from the liberated animal soul of the criminal, and which may cause them to become criminals themselves. The other persons that are punished by the performance of such an official act are the judge, the jurors, and the executioner, together with those that sanctioned the infliction of "capital punishment," and the degree in which they punish themselves will depend on whether they are thus sinning consciously or unconsciously, and whether or not they are aware of the true nature of capital punishment and its consequences. This is explained by the action of the law of Karma, a law which every lawyer and judge ought to know above all, as it is the supreme law for administering justice in the universe. It teaches that the universe is a whole, and that no individual can inflict the slightest injury upon any other individual without experiencing himself the full effect of his acts; or, as Edwin Arnold expresses it in his "Light of Asia," which, even if it is a poem, nevertheless embodies the most undeniable truths:--
"By this (law) the slayer's knife did stab himself;
The unjust judge hath lost his own defender;
The false tongue dooms its lie; the creeping thief
And spoiler rob to render.
"Such is the law which moves to righteousness,
Which none at last can turn aside or stay;
The heart of it is love; the end of it
Is peace and consummation sweet. Obey!"
The law of Karma is the law of justice and retribution, by which the harmony in the universe, which has been broken, is restored. It is a law which is administered by nobody--neither by a God nor by a man--and its action is therefore not to be avoided or thwarted, neither by bribes nor by prayers or arguments. It is the Law itself, and administers itself without partiality, its effects being in exact accordance with the causes that produced them. There is, therefore, an adequate punishment for every sin, and there is no necessity that any mortal man should presume to put himself in the place of the law and judge over the destiny of the soul of another human being. All that a man has a right and a duty in regard to criminals is to teach and instruct them, to educate and aid them to get rid of their own evil inclinations; for it ought to be kept in mind that as long as a man has no perfect self-knowledge, his will cannot be perfectly free. The ignorant man does nothing good or evil himself; he follows the thoughts that lead him. The man who has no mastery over himself is mastered by the influences which are controlling him. It is not our object at present to investigate the various methods which are employed to enforce prison discipline. They may be good or they may be bad; they may or may not be adapted to teach criminals; but surely the killing of a criminal can teach him nothing; it can only arouse in his soul a spirit of fear, embitterment and revenge, because he instinctively knows that no man has a right to rob him of his life.
The law of Karma is the law of impartial justice, which claims an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and which says that he who kills with the sword shall perish by the sword. Being a universal law, it applies itself alike to a criminal as to a judge on the bench; it is no respecter of persons; it pays no reverence to judicial wigs and gowns, and even Royalty is not exempt from premature deaths produced by the action of the Karma of former lives. He who condemns a fellow-being to death will necessarily suffer for it, either in this or some future life upon the earth. He may condemn a man, having, at the same time, the best of intentions, and he may have his own life cut short while he still has the best intentions.
Some poet asks the question about man in the following words:--
"Out of Earth's elements, mingled with flame,
Out of Life's compound of glory and shame,
Fashioned and shaped by no will of our own,
Helplessly into life's history thrown,
Born to conditions we could not foresee,
Born by a law which compels us to be,
Born by one law, through all Nature the same,
What makes us differ and who is to blame?"
Our answer to this query is that humanity, being a unit, the condition of the whole is responsible for the condition of each single individual, and that unit being made up of individuals, each individual is responsible for the conditions which affect the whole, and the responsibility of either is in exact proportion to its capacity to teach and enlighten the other. Therefore, instead of killing one another, we ought to aid each other in coming to life, for no one can be said to be truly alive as long as he does not know his own divine self, and that true Self embraces and includes the whole of creation, because God is in, and through, and above All.
F. HARTMANN.
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Theosophy and Capital Punishment
By William Q. Judge
(Originally published in The Path (10:6), September 1895, pp. 188-90.
Reprinted in The Canadian Theosophist Vol. 54, Mar.-Apr. 1973, pp.1-3; and in Echoes of the Orient 1:465-8.)
From ignorance of the truth about man's real nature and faculties and their action and condition after bodily death, a number of evils flow. The effect of such want of knowledge is much wider than the concerns of one or several persons. Government and the administration of human justice under man-made laws will improve in proportion as there exists a greater amount of information on this all-important subject. When a wide and deep knowledge and belief in respect to the occult side of nature and of man shall have become the property of the people then may we expect a great change in the matter of capital punishment.
The killing of a human being by the authority of the state is morally wrong and also an injury to all the people; no criminal should be executed no matter what the offense. If the administration of the law is so faulty as to permit the release of the hardened criminal before the term of his sentence has expired, that has nothing to do with the question of killing him.
Under Christianity this killing is contrary to the law supposed to have emanated from the Supreme Lawgiver. The commandment is: "Thou shalt not kill!" No exception is made for states or governments; it does not even except the animal kingdom. Under this law therefore it is not right to kill a dog, to say nothing of human beings. But the commandment has always been and still is ignored. The Theology of man is always able to argue away any regulation whatever; and the Christian nations once rioted in executions. At one time for stealing a loaf of bread or a few nails a man might be hanged. This, however, has been so altered that death at the hands of the law is imposed for murder only,omitting some unimportant exceptions.
We can safely divide the criminals who have been or will be killed under our laws into two classes: i.e. those persons who are hardened, vicious, murderous in nature; and those who are not so, but who, in a moment of passion, fear, or anger, have slain another. The last may be again divided into those who are sorry for what they did, and those who are not. But even those of the second class are not by intention enemies of Society, as are the others, they too before their execution may have their anger, resentment, desire for revenge and other feelings besides remorse, all aroused against Society which persecutes them and against those who directly take part in their trial and execution. The nature, passions, state of mind and bitterness of the criminal have, hence, to be taken into account in considering the question. For the condition which he is in when cut off from mundane life has much to do with the whole subject.
All the modes of execution are violent, whether by the knife, the sword, the bullet, by poison, rope, or electricity. And for the Theosophist the term violent as applied to death must mean more than it does to those who do not hold Theosophical views. For the latter, a violent death is distinguished from an easy natural one solely by the violence used against the victim. But for us such a death is the violent separation of the man from his body, and is a serious matter, of interest to the whole state. It creates in fact a paradox, for such persons are not dead; they remain with us as unseen criminals, able to do harm to the living and to cause damage to the whole of Society.
What happens? All the onlooker sees is that the sudden cutting off is accomplished; but what of the reality? A natural death is like the falling of a leaf near the winter time. The time is fully ripe, all the powers of the leaf having separated; those acting no longer, its stem has but a slight hold on the branch and the slightest wind takes it away. So with us; we begin to separate our different inner powers and parts one from the other because their full term has ended, and when the final tremor comes the various inner component parts of the man fall away from each other and let the soul go free. But the poor criminal has not come to the natural end of his life. His astral body is not ready to separate from his physical body, nor is the vital, nervous energy ready to leave. The entire inner man is closely knit together, and he is the reality. I have said these parts are not ready to separatethey are in fact not able to separate because they are bound together by law and a force over which only great Nature has control.
When then the mere physical body is so treated that a sudden, premature separation from the real man is effected, he is merely dazed for a time, after which he wakes up in the atmosphere of the earth, fully a sentient living being save for the body. He sees the people, he sees and feels again the pursuit of him by the law. His passions are alive. He has become a raging fire, a mass of hate; the victim of his fellows and of his own crime. Few of us are able, even under favorable circumstances, to admit ourselves as wholly wrong and to say that punishment inflicted on us by man is right and just, and the criminal has only hate and desire for revenge.
If now we remember that his state of mind was made worse by his trial and execution, we can see that he has become a menace to the living. Even if he be not so bad and full of revenge as said, he is himself the repository of his own deeds; he carries with him into the astral realm surrounding us the pictures of his crimes, and these are ever living creatures, as it were. In any case he is dangerous. Floating as he does in the very realm in which our mind and senses operate, he is forever coming in contact with the mind and senses of the living. More people than we suspect are nervous and sensitive. If these sensitives are touched by this invisible criminal they have injected into them at once the pictures of his crime and punishment, the vibrations from his hate, malice and revenge. Like creates like, and thus these vibrations create their like. Many a person has been impelled by some unknown force to commit crime; and that force came from such an inhabitant of our sphere.
And even with those not called "sensitive" these floating criminals have an effect, arousing evil thoughts where any basis for such exist in those individuals. We cannot argue away the immense force of hate, revenge, fear, vanity, all combined. Take the case of Guiteau, who shot President Garfield. He went through many days of trial. His hate, anger and vanity were aroused to the highest pitch every day and until the last, and he died full of curses for every one who had anything to do with his troubles. Can we be so foolish as to say that all the force he thus generated was at once dissipated? Of course it was not. In time it will be transformed into other forces, but during the long time before that takes place, the living Guiteau will float through our mind and senses carrying with him and dragging over us the awful pictures drawn and frightful passions engendered.
The Theosophist who believes in the multiple nature of man and in the complexity of his inner nature, and knows that that is governed by law and not by mere chance or by the fancy of those who prate of the need for protecting society when they do not know the right way to do it, relying only on the punitive and retaliatory Mosaic law -- will oppose capital punishment. He sees it is unjust to the living, a danger to the state, and that it allows no chance whatever for any reformation of the criminal. [RETURN TO INTRODUCTION]