JUDICIAL KILLING. By Mrs. Florence Spooner. WHAT is meant by judicial killing? I mean what Locke, Blackstone, Wright and others mean when they say man hath by nature a right not only to preserve his life, liberty and estate against injuries, and assaults of other men, but as an organized State to judge of and punish the breakers of that law, even unto death itself in crimes where the heinousness of the act in its opinion requires it. The sovereign power has the right to judge how far offenses against the Commonwealth are to be pun ished, and how assaults from without are to be repelled; and in both cases to employ all the force of all members when there shall be need. The sovereign State, as the agent of God, has power to sanction laws with penalties of death. When a question arises whether death may be inflicted for this or that offense, the wisdom of the legislative power must decide, and to this public deci sion all private judgment must submit, else there is an end of the first principle of all society and government. The quantity of the punishment must be left to the discre tion of the legislature. No private individual has power of life and death over another unless in necessary self-defense. Human life may be taken by Divine will or by the civil State as the agent of God. Suppose he who holds a God-given right to command me and whose command I am bound to obey, requires me to kill a son for disobedience. He who issues the command designates the crime, annexes the penalty, and uses me as his minister to execute it. He who issues the command does the deed. If he annexes death to theft, adultery, blas phemy, idolatry, slaveholding, or any other crime, and uses me as the executioner of his sentence, he sheds the blood, not I. When I speak of the man-killing power
I refer to mans killing man at his own will and upon his own responsibility. By judicial killing I mean that system of death penalty which civil states under different forms have erected. Perfect charity would wish that man, whether acting as individuals or na tions, should not exercise this power over man. It holds that human life had better be left solely at God's disposal. Human life is the theme, not my life, or yours merely, but human life. Not the life of a beast, but of man. Before man pre sumes to mutilate a being so divinely allied, he ought to pause and consider lest he be found assaulting the Deity himself in the person of His noblest creature. Life-taking power includes right to take property, lib erty; as the right to tear down a house in cludes the right to take down each and every part of it. Human governments have ever considered it so. Hence punishments by death, fines, chains, fetters, whips, starvation, branding, cutting out of the tongue, cropping off of the ears, boring out of the eyes, dark cells, etc. It has ever been supposed that power to punish with death includes power to punish with any infliction short of death. Why not? Massachusetts has abolished punishment by the stocks and pillory, gag ging, ducking, whipping, dark cells, brand ing, cropping (Puritan penalties), as relics of barbarism unworthy a Christian people, but retains the gallows. Barbarous to cut off the ears, but civilized to break the neck; cruel to brand but lawful to choke to death. Death is the greatest evil that can be inflicted on the body. Yet some ministers of church and state regard the lesser injuries as savage, while they look upon the penalty of death as tolerable. No Christian will shrink from the inquiry because the practice is inter woven into the social system. No matter
