Kemmlers Case and the Death-Penalty. has the inalienable right to preserve itself safely and wholesomely intact as an organ ized aggregation of individuals, — it has the inalienable right to journey its way any whither fairly and in peace. Society and its constituent human units are each entitled to security in all things which each may justly do, in all the enterprises each may justly undertake. Anything that disturbs the se renity of this security or fairly threatens to disturb it, may be abated or forestalled; but such abatement must only go so far as to sur round society with the conditions that will neutralize the activity of the disturbing forces. The law quarantines in cases of contagious epidemics not more than in isolated cases of contagious disease. The incarceration of the lunatic till cured is practically putting him in quarantine the while, for the general safety's sake. Thus the habitual drunkard is dealt with. If the lunatic's case is incur able, his incarceration is for life, he' is never killed. No one would dream of executing the death-penalty upon him, even should he commit a capital crime. In this soli tary instance the law is at once sensible and humane. Nor are the terms of incar ceration with reference to the lunatic arbi trarily admeasured. He is invariably con fined only until he is cured. Thus the object of this article is reached. It would advocate that the law proceed with the same efficacious good sense and humanity in the case of the criminal, great and small, as in the case of the lunatic. Has not, indeed, the hour come to batter, vi et armis, into the callow heads of the law-makers and codifiers this fact (vulgo plain as a pike-staff), that to trim and sort punitive and exemplary crimi nal regulations solely with respect to the crime committed as this is artificially defined by a law code, and not at all with respect to the psycho-physiological condition of the perpetrator (and source of the crime), — to measure out sentences, wholly arbitrary, for the punishment of infractions of seri ated penal provisions, instead of admin istering a course of curative treatment in
which the sentence shall figure only as a remedial agent to abate entirely inherent criminal proclivities or reduce the cause of them to a minimum of potentiality, is to recognize and prescribe only for an effect. Treatment of the effect can obviously never influence the cause productive of criminality. The criminal under such a shallow concep tion of his case must always remain a fruit ful source of mischief to society. As the remedy adopted does not touch or know the cause of the ill, the treatment must always be futile and the ill continue to persist. The work here being done wholly in darkness is idle and senseless to an astounding degree. All treatment is punishment. The patient needs medicine, the law decrees him a term of imprisonment or death. The dis pensing judges have no other prophylactic. There is no variety in the remedy of the law; it has only one prescription for all, the in fliction of pain. Owing to the monopoly which the State has in this matter of moral cure, the proceedings are summary. All the patients are driven like sheep to the sham bles, and there compelled to submit to a uni form course of treatment under unrelaxing rules for all varieties as well as intensities of the disease which afflicts them. Terms of incarceration are fixed on a cast-iron scale, or as one graduates a yardstick. The cure must be effected in every case, if its business is to be accomplished, under invariable regu lations, within a specific term of days, months, or years, that neither have any relation nor bear any proportion to the time or treatment required. And the State intrusts the ad ministration of this treatment and the appli cation of these regulations to persons of no skill whatever in the premises, indeed, to in dividuals remarkable as a rule only for very inferior intelligence and unusually hardened sensibilities. It often becomes a question which of the two, the keeper or the kept, is really most in need of treatment. In truth, the entire business is quackery, pure and sim ple; the quack insisting, as usual, that his med icine is a panacea and his treatment infallible
