Northern Weekly Gazette. — 1914-06-27 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

LEGALISED KILLING.  There is much food for thought in a pamphlet "Death a,Penalty," writtk,Al by John 0. Yeiser, ot the Nebraska Board of Pardons. A foreword. by Mr Geo. W. P. Hunt, Governor of Arizona, express-es the hope that "The day is surely and spet,dily on its way when the snuffing out of the spark of human life by that man-made contrivance known as legal form, will be no longer endured. . . . Legalised killing must go. It is the only form of crime, denied the individual, pieserved in the processes of the State. It fails in its aim to serve society but holds humank in cheek. It writ,-..s God's lays on earthly statme books, and becomes the chief offender. It punishes--if we think on the broken hearts of wives and mothers and innocent babes—but it does not punish where it seeks. It works an example, true, but an example of blood and ieveng:-!. arid murder, and as it sows it reaps. L. protects, aye it proteets the world from one inan's hand—a hand :hat may easily be held—but it gives no shield against the malignity of a thou.sand passions by its crime uniooio.:4l. It deters, but a deters only Love and Good, and the growth of the Brotherhood of Man.  'Some hold this view to be maudlin sentimentality. But it is not so. It is the ess..nee of practicality; rebellion against the unspeakable evils of superstition; an effort in behalf of that irre• sistible progress with which the methods of Society and the happiness of mankind should join the onward march of science.  "It is an appeal to man's better nattre, not lt;s ba9er ; to his reason, not, his passion; to his thought, not his prejudice; to his hope for the future, and not his pitiful blindfold reverence for tilt) ettstonro of a dark and sanguinary past.  "Wholly practical and essentially scientific, the protest against legalised must naturally look to education for its victory.  "The blowing out of that God-lighted flarne—the taking away, coldly, deliloerately, premeditatedly of a human life, either by an individual or by the chofen agents of a collection of individuals. enormous responsibility. Who views it light; from the standpoint of ihk. state is as great 4.1 menace to Society as the criminal of disordered niinci or distorted brain who employs it to °chic k his evil ends.  .s  " I view it with the inmost solemnity, with a profound conviction of the terrible wrong it con. templates and as Governor of tny State, I cannot, in the absence of a definite. direct expression froni the sovereign people, following a discussion so thorough that ther2 can be no reasorrable doubt of their decision's finality, assume so portentous et responeibility. In the' Arizona penitentiary some six or a dozen murderers are standing in shadow of the gallows, with nothing but my reprie.e between them and eternity. I have nothing to :3:4 in condonation of their crimes, but I contempiate the law's proposal to thrust them into the rathomlef#s abyss of the inscrutable beyond, by the conr mission of a public crime identical with the one of which they stand individua,ily convicted, not only with a personal sense of the most positive repulsion, but firm and steadfast in the belief that an act so cruel arid malifircent must surely stain  ti le  the escutcheon of the State."