Do not fear that he will call things by their name, pooh! For any idea of nudity to which you may object he has a complete disguise of epithets and adjectives. He makes Monsieur Sanson presentable. He glosses over the chopper. He stumps the seesaw. He twists the red basket into a paraphrase. You no longer know what it is. It is sweet-sounding and decent. Can you picture him at night, in his office, composing at his ease, and to the best of his ability, the harangue which will raise a scaffold in six weeks? Do you see him sweating with blood and perspiration to fit the head of an accused man into the most fatal article of the code of law? Do you see him cutting off a wretch’s head with a poorly made law? See how he inserts into a mess of tropes and synecdoches two or three poisonous texts, in order to express and extract at great pains the death of a man. Is it not true that while he writes, he probably has the hangman crouching at his feet, beneath his table, in the dark; and that he stops writing from time to time to say to him, like a master to his dog, “Lie still there! Lie still! You shall have your bone”?

In his private life this public man may be an honest fellow, a good father, a good son, a kind husband and friend, and all the epithets of Père-Lachaise read.

Let us hope that the day is at hand when the law will abolish these mournful duties. The atmosphere of our civilization alone should use capital punishment.

One is sometimes tempted to believe that the advocates of capital punishment have not carefully reflected on what it is. But weigh in the scales of some crime this exorbitant right which society takes upon herself to remove, what she has not given, this punishment, this most irreparable of irreparable punishments!

Of two cases this is one:—

The man whom you kill has no family, no relatives, no friends. In this case he has had no education, no instruction, neither care for his mind nor for his heart; then, by what right do you kill this poor orphan? You punish him because in his childhood he crept on the ground without help and without a protector! You ascribe to him, as a forfeit, the isolation in which you have left him. You make a crime of his misfortune! No one taught him to know what he was doing. The man is ignorant. His fault is in his destiny, not in him. You kill an innocent man. Or, the man has a family; and then do you think that the blow by which you kill him hurts him alone? that his father, his mother, his children will not be disgraced? No. In killing him, you behead his whole family. And here, again, you kill innocent beings.

Awkward and blind penalty which, turn where it may, kills the innocent!

Imprison this man, this criminal with a family. In his cell he can still work for his own. But how can he provide for them in the depths of the tomb? And can you think without shuddering of what will become of his little boys, his little girls, whose father, and consequently their bread, you take away? Are you counting on this family from which to supply, after fifteen years, the galleys from the boys, the low music-hall from the girls? Oh, the poor little innocents!

In the colonies, when a slave receives capital punishment, a thousand francs indemnity are given to the man’s master. What! you indemnify the master, and not the family! Here, again, do you not take a man from those who own him? Is he not, by a more sacred right than that of the slave to the master, the property of his father, his wife, his children?

We have already convicted your law of assassination. Now, here it is convicted of robbery.

Still another point. Do you think of the man’s soul? Do you know its condition? Do you dare to despatch it so freely? Formerly, at least, the people had some faith; at the final moment the feeling of religion that was in the air softened the most hard-hearted; a victim was at the same time a penitent; religion opened one life to him as society closed the other; every soul had a knowledge of God; the scaffold was but the outer gate of heaven. But what hope do you place on the scaffold, now that the mass has no more faith? now that every religion is attacked by the dry-rot, like the old ships which lie unheeded in our ports, and which once discovered, perhaps, worlds? now that little children ridicule God? By what right do you undertake something in which you yourselves doubt the dark souls of your condemned, such souls as Voltaire and Monsieur Pigault-Lebrun have made them? You deliver them into the hands of the priest of the prison, an excellent old man, no doubt; but does he believe, and will he make them believe? Does he not make drudgery of his sublime task? Do you consider him a priest, this good man who jostles against the hangman in the wagon? A writer of soul and talent has said before us: “It is a horrible thing to keep the hangman, after having sent away the confessorl”

Those, no doubt, are nothing but “sentimental reasons,” some scornful people may say whose logic comes only from their head. To our mind these are the best. We often prefer reasons of sentiment to reasons of judgment. Moreover, the two are always connected; remember that. “The Treatise on Crimes” is grafted upon the “Spirit of the Law.” Montesquieu engendered Beccaria.

Reason is on our side, feeling is on our side, experience is on our side. In the model states where capital punishment is abolished, the number of capital crimes decreases year after year.