blood-thirstiness in the unthinking masses and defeats its own ends--is
itself a cause of murder, not a check. These gentlemen are themselves of
"the unthinking masses"--they do not know how to think. Let them try to
trace and lucidly expound the chain of motives lying between the
knowledge that a murderer has been hanged and the wish to commit a
murder. How, precisely, does the one beget the other? By what unearthly
process of reasoning does a man turning away from the gallows persuade
himself that it is expedient to incur the danger of hanging? Let us have
pointed out to us the several steps in that remarkable mental progress.
Obviously, the thing is absurd; one might as reasonably say that
contemplation of a pitted face will make a man wish to go and catch
smallpox, or the spectacle of an amputated limb on the scrap-heap of a
hospital tempt him to cut off his arm or renounce his leg.

"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," say the opponents of the
death penalty, "is not justice; it is revenge and unworthy of a
Christian civilization." It is exact justice: nobody can think of
anything more accurately just than such punishments would be, whatever
the motive in awarding them. Unfortunately such a system is not
practicable, but he who denies its justice must deny also the justice of
a bushel of corn for a bushel of corn, a dollar for a dollar, service
for service. We can not undertake by such clumsy means as laws and
courts to do to the criminal exactly "what he has done to his victim,
but to demand a life for a life is simple, practicable, expedient and
(therefore) right.

"Taking the life of a murderer does not restore the life he took,
therefore it is a most illogical punishment. Two wrongs do not make a
right."