EXECUTIONS BY ELECTRICITY.
WE are unable, as at present advised, to expect good from the great social experiment which New York is about to try ; but there can be no doubt that it is one of exceeding psychological as well as political and social interest. It is stated in a telegram of the 18th inst., signed by the special correspondent of the Times, that the New York Assembly, or popular House, has passed a Bill substituting death by electricity for death by banging in capital cases, and also prohibiting the publication of the details of executions. The Bill was passed by the remarkable majority of 87 to 8; and it is understood, therefore, that it will not be resisted in the New York Senate, though, of course, the Governor of the State, who is not responsible to either body, may exercise his privilege of veto. It is most probable, however, that the Bill will become law, and that the new method of execution, which has been repeatedly recommended by men of science, will be carefully tried, under circumstances that will induce the world to pay strict attention to its results. Details are not to be published in the newspapers, New Yorkers being weary of their journalists' habit of pandering to the appetite for the horrible ; but we may assume that there will be inquests, and that both jurists and men of science will be permitted to report upon the consequences flowing from the new method. Judged from the speculative point of view, those consequences should, socially at least, be entirely bad, for the new law offers in one way a premium on crime. It provides that the murderer shall die a less painful death than the majority of innocent mankind. Men do not know, and cannot know except through a revelation, precisely what death is, whether the spirit suffers a painless translation, or whether its escape inflicts on the body agony such as accom- panies its birth into the world ; but the opinion of most of the competent observers whose experience is great is, we believe, that "the actual occurrence called death, whatever its precise nature, is unattended with conscious suffering, the phenomena which sometimes suggest a contrary conclusion being mainly automatic." It is, however, part of human knowledge that the sufferings which in an immense number of cases, probably in a majority of cases, precede death, are most severe, and deserve in some instances the appellation "torture." This is certainly the ease with many wounds on the battle-field, with all fatal burns not medically treated, with all deaths from thirst, and with a whole list of diseases with which it is not necessary to excite our readers' compassion or alarm. There is, in fact, little need of evidence, for men all over the world are so impressed with the accumu- lated facts, that to die "as in sleep," or "like a child," or "painlessly," are all expressions conveying a certain surprise, as well as a deep thankfulness. In executions by electricity, all these sufferings are prevented. Death must be instan- taneous beyond all natural precedent, and there is an extreme probability, supported by a mass of evidence from persons who have been rendered unconscious, but not killed, by lightning, that the action of electricity when the shock is strong outruns the speed of the transmission of sensation. Unconsciousness arrives before pain can be perceived, and the stricken man reports, if he survives, that he felt nothing. It is an offence against the instinctive sense of justice to reserve such a privilege for the exceptionally wicked, to give to a murderer like Palmer a fate which an Emperor like Frederick III, might desire in vain ; and such offences always bear evil fruit, though not always of the anticipated kind. In this case, for instance, the result which one would at first sight expect may not arise, but another, nearly as bad, and much more likely to escape attention. Intending murderers, it is usually said, may feel that a menace has been withdrawn, and that they are more free to slay; and in countries where murderers are usually disbelievers, and where suicide is more often contemplated than with us: that, we conceive, would be the inevitable result. With a certain class of criminal, the educated poisoner and the cultivated murderer for gain, that will be the result, among ourselves, also, the deterrent effect of hanging consisting partly in the disgrace attached for ages to that method of execution. We confess, however, to a doubt whether among the ordinary criminals of a population like that of New York, death by electricity will be less deterrent than death by the rope. The unerring certainty of the method and its appalling sudden- ness, the absence of that lingering hope that the rope may break, and so there may come reprieve, and the horror—if we may affront some readers by the suggestion—of suffering the very penalty which, in the imagination of the ignorant through all ages, has come most directly from God, may breed a fear as deep as the fear of the rope, or even deeper than it. Nothing appals like lightning, and death by lightning may appal a brute insensible to the horror of an ordinary execution. If so, as the majority of murders are committed by callous brutes, the new mode of execution may prove even more deterrent than the old, and we must look elsewhere for the consequences which, nevertheless, we half-instinctively expect.
May not the consequence of inflicting painless death for
crime, a consequence slow to arrive and at first unperceived, be a deadening of the natural and most beneficial horror of inflicting death too readily ? The new philanthropists will smile at us, and say the dislike to the penalty of death is in- creasing everywhere; but if they were accessible to argument, we could show them reasons for doubting that conclusion. The tendency to war does not decrease, though the habit of preaching against it increases; and if it lasts, the dislike of capital punish- ment for adequate reason cannot long survive. The dislike exists for this one moment out of all the ages, Christian ages as well as Pagan; but though mankind is not wise, it is too absurdly illogical, considered by itself, to keep its place long in the thoughts of men. It involves, under the theory now, for example, rampant in Italy, this preposterous assertion, that while there is no sacredness in human life as such, while it is noble to shoot an ignorant conscript who under the compul- sion of discipline invades your country, and justifiable to shoot the soldier who will not invade another country when he is ordered, there is a sacro-sanctity in life if only it is criminal and noxious. The mutineer must die, but the murderer must be spared ; it is a duty to slaughter out an invading regiment which may slay and burn, but wicked to slaughter the miscreant who has burned or slain. There can be no future for an idea so essentially silly as that; and when it passes away, there may come with the reaction from it an undue hardening of the general heart. The impulse of the day is to be over-soft; but the tendency of thought, which will outlast the impulse of the day, is towards adamantine hardness, towards, that is, the scientific view of things—the view which suggests that death is not only the most deterrent of all punishments for crime, but the one least embarrassing to the innocent community, and most certain to prevent the hereditary descent of criminal instincts. If there is no knowledge save scientific knowledge, Plato was right when tie sentenced all misshapen babies, and it would be hard to answer Mr. Cotter Morison's terrible suggestions as to the prevention of any accumulation of criminal pro- clivities. The world will harden as it grows scientific, harden towards all impediments to the material happiness which it seeks for mankind, harden towards criminals, for example, as Irish tenants have hardened towards " land-grabbers "—think of their "sympathetic tenderness "—and our children may see a generation willing, "in the interest of the deepest welfare of the whole community," to pour out death in buckets. On what scientific principle, for instance, should the irre- claimable criminal, or the pauper lunatic, tax the com- munity for years to support his noxiousness ? The doctrine of euthanasia for criminals will be preached—indeed, is preached in some quarters already—and it may yet find acceptance in those new societies where the only ideal that really prevails is the ideal of comfort on this earth and for all men. If such a generation arises, or if the hearts of men approximate towards the hearts that such a generation would possess, it would be found that with the practice of killing only by coarse and painful methods, revolting even to those who, like ourselves, deem capital punishment indispensable, a great restraint on killing had disappeared. To slay painlessly, without fuss, without bloodshed, without dis- figurement of the human frame, would seem so very easy, and comparatively so little shocking. There are very few men, however brutal, who would not sooner order a hundred men to be fusilladed out of sight than a hundred men to be separately hanged before them ; and execution by elec- tricity, involving as it does no pain, is far less brutal even than fusillading. Suppose all the irreclaimable convicts in London executed in silence, secretly, with no possibility of pain, would the announcement of the fact create half the repugnance which the execution of one criminal does now? Capital punishment is just ; but something to make the Judge and juryman reflect, to make him fear for his own re- sponsibility, to make him search his conscience, in theologi- cal phrase, is an indispensable check ; and in abolishing pain, and the knowledge of details, and personal action in execu- tions, we, to the extent of human power, take that check away. It is foolish to assert that this would not be the case, or that men would be equally moved by the bare record of the number of deatha. Who ia moved by the Regiatrar-General's weekly return, or the return of deaths in a convict-prison ? Do you suppose that Mary Tudor's martyrs dying invisible, without pain, without report save that they were dead, would have shocked London into Protestantism ? They would have passed, as even now convicts sentenced to labour for life passe to their doom unheeded, except by the few who make their destinies a study. It is a human instinct which in all countries has prohibited poison as a means of executing ordinary crimi- nals, and has compelled rulers to let supreme justice be done in methods the very coarseness and brutality of which force legislators and judges and juries to consider painfully what they do. The guarantee against laxity in inflicting death, and therefore against a brutalisation of society, is that very sympa- thetic horror, that pain in the hearts of the innocent, which the Legislature of New York, in its hungry pursuit of happi- ness, is calmly legislating away. It is not making laws in order that criminals be not hurt, for convicts have no votes. Its object is to reduce the pain of the society which inflicts, not of the criminal who suffers, death; and in reducing it, it is reducing that society's care to have its conscience clear. "What matters if he died? He was a criminal, and he died painlessly." That will be the real state of public feeling; and while we advocate the death-penalty as the supreme deterrent, justified by the right of society to inflict adequate vengeance for wrong-doing, we hold that state of feeling to be at once dangerous and bad.
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