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right of kings, the New World evolved the idea of a sovereign people and a government vested with popular arbitrary power. Hence come the axioms that all men are born free and equal, and that government exists by consent of the governed — principles questionable enough in the light of experience, and productive, for conquerors and expansionists, of much embarrassment and seeming inconsistency. The ship of State in shunning Scylla goes smash upon Charybdis. The middle course is safest, viz., that the people have a right indeed to choose the administration, but that the duly elected are thereupon clothed with power directly from on high. The State's right, therefore, to inflict capital punishment, neither comes from the people, nor can it be abrogated by them, though its exercise may by common consent be suspended. So inherent, so necessary to civil authority is this power, that not even the State itself can renounce it. The inalienable right of self-defence belongs to the State as well as to the individual, and obedience to law and order is the very life of the State. Now, love and fear are the motives of obedience, but of the two fear is the stronger. It is the duty of the government, therefore, to fit the punishment to the crime — to preserve evenly balanced the scales in the hands of justice — and so violently is that balance disturbed by certain species of murder, that equilibrium can be restored only by weighing a life against a life. For, whether the object of punishment be to reclaim the criminal, deter the vicious, or satisfy the outraged majesty of the law, its propor-