Kemmlers Case and the Death-Penalty. poor wretch Kemmler signifies little before these. Here, indeed, the principles are of more importance than the man and his life. No question surrounding the subject in any aspect discussed can or will be settled in manner such as the Kemmlerian or sightblinkered law juridical and judicial here has pursued. It does not touch the gist and essence of the thing in controversy. Capi tal punishment still remains murder sanc tioned by law. True, if one fairly and suffi ciently established doubt be created in the dense muddle of conflicting expert testimony against the mere mechanical efficacy of the killing method by electricity, it should be enough to brand the law's slaughter by that method, and its untried and uncertain if not altogether too horrible instrumentalities, as wholly unavailable for society's uses. Herein, however, reposes no remedy for the great wrong of centuries. The death-penalty should not exist. Founded ages ago in the cruelty of the Hebrew gospel, that gospel has more than ceased to furnish a fair standard for present human affairs. It is harsh and fal lible. Nothing in it ever justified a man, or body of men, in killing another, unless the " ipse dixit fiat " of alleged divine origin controls; be the same with or without suffi cient proof. Wherefore in these enlightened days it may surely be claimed, as claimed it is in most resonant tone by many voices, that reform which does not abolish mankilling by law is no reform; that dilet tanti shall be forevermore estopped from invoking the superannuated doctrine of re taliation to justify them in groping about the four quarters of the American horizon to find a substitute for the noose, — dilet tanti who end the brutal quest in chat tering, flippant gabble, by recommending an experiment and leaving the people of a great State in a brown study speculating over its efficacy. What is crime, truly? Is it a disease or a voluntary inclination? Is it an accidental moral phenomenon? Is it ever brought on deliberately by cultivation to develop finally 8
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into uncontrollable habit? Is it hereditary and indefinitely transmissible? Does it ever repose latent in any case, to spring forth sheer spontaneously under the spur of given circumstances, all unexpected, unforeseen, and unpreventable? Is it a certain purely phys ical peculiarity in the functions of some cra nial tissue? These queries can now be answered. Sta tisticians will aid in the task. The medical fact (or rather medico-psychological fact) is well established, that certain lesions of, or injuries to, the brain will occasion utter moral obliquity and even positive viciousness where the moral sense was originally sound and normal; that these lesions or inju ries will, in fact, totally revolutionize func tional activity in the operation of drawing sound moral distinctions, to the extent of an nihilating the capability of drawing them entirely. The revelations of statistics disclose that the criminal is a regularly recurring phenom enon. He represents a fixed quantity, con stant in all organized communities. So it comes about that a serious question con cerning his responsibility for crime has arisen in advanced minds. This question has been frequently discussed, yet hereto fore and until quite recently with little hope of any universally satisfactory solution of all the problems involved, because the bellicosely contentious doctrines of free-will and predestination were ever stubbornly en twined about and wofully tangled the dis cussion, while the results of natural science were ignored. The war of words that has been waged in this desolate metaphysical region in all thinking ages has on occa sions even compassed the ludicrous and gro tesque; for the mediaeval sciolists, with much idle time on their hands, spent days over the query whether it was possible for an angel to sin or commit a crime. The dis cussion pro and con here proceeded at white heat, just as did the discussion of how many angels could dance on the point of a needle, and the discussion whether angels possessed
