COBWEBBED CONSCIENCES.
S0/tiE people seem to think that the proper function of the conscience is to envelop the soul with a kind of network of cobwebs, so that it cannot move freely in any direction without the kind of shiver which runs through us when the face encounters one of the gossamer threads which the spiders spread from tree to tree on fine autumn mornings. Now, we maintain that though it is a perfectly legitimate and even essential function of the conscience to send through us that fine thrill of fear when we are contemplating anything really and clearly wrong, no conscience can be turned to a worse use,—and yet it is a very common use,—than that of manufacturing a great number of imaginary and artificial warnings against altogether fanciful sins which have no existence except in the morbid imagination of the mind that invented them. The healthy conscience is not like a stroke of paralysis on all our active powers,—is much rather a bracing and stimulating influence, which helps us to push through our work in life, instead of compelling us to hesitate and falter over it. And nothing can be a greater perversion of the functions of the conscience, than its diversion from the best means of making our way straight and plain, to the invention of a great network of labyrinthine scruples in the toils of which all energy and freshness are exhausted. What has set us on this line of thought is a curious telegram received not many, days ago from the United States, in which we are told that "the first execution with the new automatic hanging apparatus took place early yesterday morning at Hartford, Counecticut,' United States, when the murderer Cronin paid the penalty of his crime. At midnight (according to a Dalziel telegram) the ' Sheriff entered the condemned man's cell and read the death- warrant to him, shortly after which the procession was started to the scaffold. As soon as Cronin stepped on the trap his weight set the automatic machinery in motion and dropped the counter weight, which fell, jerking his body 15 ft. in the I air. His neck was broken instantly. Unusual interest has been attracted to this execution as a great many ministers have denounced the apparatus, which they state practically, compels the criminal to be guilty of his own death, and which they declare the law has no right to permit." Now, the scruples of such religious ministers as these seem to us mere cobwebs which only a morbid conscience could have invented. If the hangman is degraded by his duty, surely it is far more important to get rid of the necessity of imposing on him a degrading office which clings to his name and. renders him a sort of leper in the world, than it is to relieve the criminal of the perfectly ima- ginary responsibility of committing suicide. You might jest as well say that, in walking to the scaffold, instead of compelling the officers of the law to carry him there, he commits suicide, as that because he happens to put in motion the machinery by which he is strangled, he is responsible for putting an end to his own life. It is the law and the ministers of justice that take that responsi- bility. If capital punishment is right at all, as it is, or even if it is wrong, as it is not, it is not the criminal who is responsible for putting it in force, except so far as he is responsible for the crime which justifies the law and the ministers of the law in pronouncing this sentence upon him. To maintain that because he is made the physical means of executing the sentence passed upon him, he com- mits suicide, is much more fallacious than to argue that because he pleads " Guilty " when he might possibly have escaped by pleading "Not guilty," he commits suicide. Just as it would be adding sin to sin to plead "Not guilty" when he knows himself to be guilty, so it would be adding, at least, fresh injury against his fellow- creatures to his sin, to compel some one to undergo all the contumely and misery of a discredited duty, rather than accept the decision of the law as final, and concur, as far as possible, in carrying out the sentence passed upon him by the tribunals of the State of which he is a subject. We suspect that those who contrived such an objection as this, must have been men who condemn all capital punishment, and therefore feel offended at any device for diminishing the amount of humiliation and odium which capital punishment, as at present adminietered, involves. But that is a very THE FUTURE OF THE JAPANESE. good illustration of one of the causes by which the reality and vigour of the conscience is lowered,—namely, by forcing it into the support of dubious abstract theories, and so finding for them an artificial backbone, to which they would otherwise does not speculate, however carelessly, on the form have no pretension. The conscience is so great a power in character that its help is constantly coveted in cases to which take. There has been nothing so amazing or so interesting it has really no applicability at all, and nothing weakens it modern history as their sudden bound forward into a new more, nothing involves us in more entanglements of false yet apparently peremptory obligations, thnn any deficiency in that years from all external influences except a slight one exer. instinctive jealousy of lending its authority, where its authority cised from China, and then brought against their will into does not really apply, which sometimes turns highly conscien- violent contact with Europe, they have in a short twenty tious men into scrupulous faddists, who can hardly go a single years assimilated so much of the knowledge and organisation step without coming upon simulated cases of conscience to of the West, as to place themselves on a level of power with which a healthy conscience would have nothing to Bay. St. most European States ; have conquered, almost without Paul gives us the great rule for avoiding traps of this kind, effort, the huge neighbour who despised them ; and will when he tells us not to give unnecessary offence to the timid probably, within a few months, stand forward a compact, scruples of others, and yet encourages us to face for ourselves highly organised modern State, with a full Treasury, a fleet the truth that such scruples have no real force at all, except able to deal with an equal one of the highest scientific so far as they entangle the less clear-sighted in imaginary construction, and an army which may be, for any evidence to cases of conscientious embarrassment. But when the State the contrary, equal in fighting power to any other army of decrees that a man shall die, and is ready to enforce that equal numbers. Released from the torpor of ages, full of the decree, it is purely childish to treat his submission to the pride of life, and conscious to their finger.tips of capacity for effort, what will they next do in the way of self-development P ti authority of the State as suicide unless he compels the inter- ferenee of an acknowledged executioner at the last moment. You might as well say that he was a suicide if he got out of even if they are not a staying people—upon which point we bed and dressed himself on the morning of his execution instead of compelling his gaolers to drag him out and dress hundred and fifty years advance swiftly; and in what direction him. Such attempts as this to make him appear an accomplice will the advance be P We set aside for the moment all questions in his own execution are the mere sleight of hand by which of war, though the Japanese may be, and probably intend to
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