Kemmlers Case and the Death-Penalty. English conscience and ate down into it like an acid, — was there a movement begun to better court and prison, to make these institutions fit and fair to exist in this day of Christian enlightenment. And both are still susceptible of improvement before any such thing as perfection about them is approximated. Great reforms are always long and very fiercely clamored for ere they are realized. They are too often conditioned, it would seem, only upon bloody upheavals and national con vulsions. Salutary, despite all its horrors, was the French Revolution. Then, again, acci dent too comes strangely into play at times, where the matter of a great reform is con cerned. Does not the reader remember upon what slender thread hung the abolition of slavery on the North American continent, when the brightest, fiercest, and to all ap pearances most uncompromising agitator against traffic in man and human bondage generally, Horace Greeley, after the first Bull Run disaster, cried out for peace at any price be this even the autonomy of the rebel lious South, which meant endless perpetua tion of the awful wrong, — cried out thus in tearful missive to Abraham Lincoln? And Abraham Lincoln? Saintly man and lofty patriot alike! He was a Republican aboli tionist, elected to the presidency of the United States on an abolition platform; yet, when first urged by the lights of his party to issue the emancipation proclamation, with humanity's inarticulate cry against the wrong of slavery piercing his ears and heart alike, he hesitated long, — good and true lover of his whole country, — hoping to preserve the Union and avert a protracted fratricidal strug gle by inaction here. His strange hesitation he explained with the declaration that he was willing to welcome the Southern States back into he fold of the Union " with or without slavery," if they would but consent to re turn, — mark, reader! — "with or without slavery." In this land where Jefferson erst promul gated the lofty doctrine that all men are IS
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created free, had not the fiat gone forth from the bench of the Supreme Court by the lips of its great Chief-Justice, John Mar shall, and been solemnly concurred in by each of Marshall's begowned associate justices long before Taney's Dred Scott decision, — the fiat, we repeat, that " slavery, which has received the assent of all, must be the law of all; . . . the world has agreed that it [slavery] is a legitimate result of force; the state of things which is then produced by general consent cannot be pronounced unlawful "? 1 Yet have we not outgrown that barbarous law, and was not the fiat exploded amid can non-thunder into the minutest and most contemptible shreds? Ay, on slender threads, indeed, hang ofttimes great reforms. Shall then vehemence of language in behalf of them, — shall impa tience ask grace, or bend the knee for par don when indulged? And may not the Kemmler case, with its burning questions and its solemn folly, evolve some lucky accident to benefit the human race, and reform the current legal conception of crime as well as the current criminal procedure of the courts in the matter of penalties and sentences? At any rate, one may smile sadly as one ponders over the anomalous philanthropy which expects to succeed in rendering such a tragic and horrible thing as man-killing humane by any mechanical device, to say nothing about electricity. What humane-ity have we here truly! Were it not verily pro gress herein to view the criminal in the same dispassionate and unprejudiced light with the cripple or the leper, and to view crime, not as the individual's culpable fault, but as a misfortune possibly primordial, from which society is likely to suffer always, and which it can no more hope to evade or escape than disease, though the means to ameliorate it will improve as the centuries round up their results, as the human heart and mind broaden and the light of all things clears, — as charity truly becomes the greatest of all virtues? 110 Wheaton, U. S. Reports, 120
