Rock Island daily Argus. (Rock Island, Ill.) 1886-1893, 1893-06-02
THE DEATH PENALTY.
SOCIAL COMPACT THAT UNDERLIES
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT.

The Fundamental Law of Man Which Com
pels the State to Take the Life of One
Who Has by His Own Hand Taken the
Life of Another-The Right to Take Life.
thinking, speaking and writing about capt.
tai crime and its punishment. We are
growing too much accustomed to hear muir
der trials discussed as if they were contests
between prosecuting officers eager to en-
force the vengeance of a cruel and blood
thirsty state and the legal champions of an
unfortunate prisoner seeking to escape the
penalties of an unrighteous law. That is
false view of the matter-utterly false.
Reference is in order to the first princi
pies on which society rests. There are
some primary truths which it seems need
to be firmly reasserted.
There were natural laws long before any
human laws were enacted. They are ele-
mental, and their justice is self evident.
Among these natural laws there is one that
stands surely first. 1t is expressed in the
homely proverb, Self preservation is the
first law of nature" From this first law
of nature it followed that when men lived
without organized society and had no state,
no written law, no courts and no regular
machinery of justice, any man whose wife
or daughter or son or brother or kinsman
Il,
home was invaded by any kind of violence,
had the right of retaliation in his own
hands. If any of his household were slain,
he had the right to kill the slayer
This natural law rules everywhere today
outside the picket fence of organized civ
ilization. 1t would rule in the United
States again and instantly if it were dis
tinctly proclaimed that laws and courts
had ceased to exist and that every man, wo-
man and child in the community had as
much protection as and no more than they
could provide for themselves. All the
.horities on law and justice that have ever
spoken or written from the time of Moses
down to the days of Recorder Smyth, have
agreed upon this point, that the right of
defensive and protective retaliation for in
jury is a natural one conferred by the Gre
ator upon every man, and not to be taken
away from him unless an equivalent pro-
lection be afforded by the state.
The state is the product of civilization,
but what is the state? The state is simply
a social compact. 1t is a contract between
every individual member of it and the col
lective community. The individual agrees
to give up many of his individual rights.
Among them he agrees to give up the right
to kill at sight the man who assails him or
any of his kindred and binds himself never
to kill, except when in his Judgment his
own life will be lost if he does not. The
individual agrees further not to kill at
sight the assassin or the violator of his
wife or daughter, but instead to leave the
man who has thus irreparably injured him
to the public justice of the state. But the
individual citizen is only one party to the
social contract. The state also agrees to do
certain things in return for the surrender
of individual rights.
The state binds itself to give to the in
dividual citizen, through its laws and its
courts, the same just satisfaction which he
would be clearly entitled to demand and
take if he lived in n desert where no human
tribunal existed. The state says to him:
The right to kill the man who kills your
nearest and dearest ones is surrendered, but
it is not lost. If your home is invaded, your
hearthstone desecrated, your household
robbed of its inmates to fill premature and
bloody graves, the collective state will hold
him who does these things to the same &C
countability to which you yourself could
and would hold him if you lived in state
of nature, in the full enjoyment of your
natural rights"
The law which makes murder punishable
with death is the logical outcome of that
compact between the state and the iudivid-
ual citizen. 1t is idle to talk of the state rs
having any malice to crafty or any ven
geance to appease against such u man as
Amy, the murderer Of Christie Warden in
New Hampshire, Harris in New York.
Society collectively can not and does not
seek the life of any man. But the state has
made compact under which it is stipu-
lated that the natural right of private ven
geance shall not be exercised, Yet by that
same compact it has guaranteed to protect
every household within its borders from all
such invasions and violations ard to do it
by placing every man in the community
under "a bond not to kill, with the penalty
attached to the bond that if he will not let
another live neither shall he live himself
We may theorize, and speculate, and
split legal hairs, and raise moral bubbles
from now to the crack of doom, but we
never can get away from the basic laws of
human nature. Men will never surrender
their natural right to defend their lives,
their homes, their wives and their children
against the assassin by killing him any
longer than the state fulflls its duty to
hold murderers to the same expiration
which, if there We're no laws and no courts,
they would certainly be held by those
whom they wronged and they never ought
to surrender thames w. Clarke in New
York Recorder