"Rail not on me-thy charge is vain-Rodrigo de Bivar! Pale was his brow, but flash'd with fire his dark and kindling eye: "I give thee pardon, knight," he said, "though thy speech doth wound me sore," And as he spake his hand he laid upon El Campeador. 66 Nay, offer not thy hand to me," exclaim'd the Cid aloud; No King I know, no worship owe, save my good sword and war; Alfonso then with passion shook; his brow and cheek were pale. 66 By Heav'n! good King, it likes me well," replied El Campeador; "I bid your banners long farewell; your bidding wounds me sore; A single year thou'st banished me ;-the crime deserveth more : Bivar demands not liberty till years expire four !" With that he turned upon his heel, and left the King alone- (To be continued in our December Number.) A DIALOGUE. BY WALTER WHITMAN. WHAT Would be thought of a man who, having an ill humor in his blood, should strive to cure himself by only cutting off the festers, the outward signs of it, as they appeared upon the surface? Put criminals for festers and society for the diseased man, and you may get the spirit of that part of our laws which expects to abolish wrongdoing by sheer terror-by cutting off the wicked, and taking no heed of the causes of wickedness. I have lived long enough to know that national folly never deserves contempt; else should I laugh to scorn such an instance of exquisite nonsense! Our statutes are supposed to speak the settled will and voice of the community. We may imagine, then, a conversation of the following sort to take place-the imposing majesty of the people speaking on the one side, a pallid, shivering convict on the other. "I have done wrong," says the convict; "in an evil hour a kind of frenzy came over me, and I struck my neighbor a heavy blow, which killed him. Dreading punishment, and the disgrace * The older writers transfer to "owe" the sense of "own": "You make me strange, Ev'n to the disposition that I owe." Ibid.-Et passim. of my family, I strove to conceal the deed, but it was discovered." "Then," says society, "you must be killed in return." "But," rejoins the criminal, "I feel that I am not fit to die. I have not enjoyed life-I have not been happy or good. It is so horrid to look back upon one's evil deeds only. Is there no plan by which I can benefit my fellowcreatures, even at the risk of my own life?" "None," answers society;" you must be strangled-choked to death. If your passions are so ungovernable that people are in danger from them, we shall hang you." 66 Why that?" asks the criminal, his wits sharpened perhaps by his situation. "Can you not put me in some strong prison, where no one will be harmed by me? And if the expense is anything against this, let me work there, and support myself." "No," responds society, "we shall strangle you; your crime deserves it." "Have you, then, committed no crimes?" asks the murderer. "None which the law can touch," answers society. "True, one of us had a mother, a weak-souled creature, that pined away month after month, and at last died, because her dear son was intemperate, and treated her ill. Another, who is the owner of many houses, thrust a sick family into the street because they did not pay their rent, whereof came the deaths of two little children. And another-that particularly well-dressed man-effected the ruin of a young girl, a silly thing who afterward became demented, and drowned herself in the river. One has gained much wealth by cheating his neighbors but cheating so as not to come within the clutches of any statute. And hundreds are now from day to day practising deliberately the most unmanly and wicked meannesses. We are all frail!” "And these are they who so sternly clamor for my blood!" exclaims the convict in amazement. "Why is it that I alone am to be condemned?" "That they are bad," rejoins society," is no defence for you." "That the multitude have so many faults that none are perfect," says the criminal, "might at least make them more lenient to me. If my physical temperament subjects me to great passions, which lead me into crime, when wronged too-as I was when I struck that fatal blow-is there not charity enough among you to sympathise with me to let me not be hung, but safely separated from all that I might harm?" "There is some reason in what you say," answers society; "but the clergy, who hate the wicked, say that God's own voice has spoken against you. We might, perhaps, be willing to let you off with imprisonment; but Heaven imperatively forbids it, and demands your blood. Besides, that you were wronged, gave you no right to revenge yourself by taking life." "Do you mean me to understand, then," asks the convict, "that Heaven is more blood-thirsty than you? And if wrong gives no right to revenge, why am I arraigned thus?" "The case is different," rejoins society. "We are a community-you are but a single individual. should forgive your enemies." You "And are you not ashamed," asks the culprit, "to forget that as a community which you expect me to remember as a man? While the town clock goes wrong, shall each little private watch be abused for failing to keep the true time? What are communities but congregated individuals? And if you, in the potential force of your high position, deliberately set examples of retribution, how dare you look to me for self-denial, forgiveness, and the meekest and most difficult virtues ?" "I cannot answer such questions," responds society; "but if you propose no punishment for the bad, what safety is there for our citizens' rights and peace, which would then be in continual jeopardy?” "You cannot,” says the other, "call a perpetual jail no punishment. It is a terrible one. And as to your safety, it will be outraged less by mild and benevolent criminal laws than by sanguinary and revengeful ones. They govern the insane better with gentleness than severity. Are not men possessing reason more easily acted on through moral force than men without?" "But, I repeat it, crimes will then multiply," says society (not having much else to say); "the punishment must be severe, to avoid that. Release the bad from the fear of hanging, and they will murder every day. We must preserve that penalty to prevent this taking of life." "I was never ignorant of the penalty," answers the criminal; "and yet I murdered, for my blood was up. Of all the homicides committed, not one in a hundred is done by persons unaware of the law. So that you see the terror of death does not deter. The hardened and worst criminals, too, frequently have no such terror, while the more repentant and humanised suffer in it the most vivid agony. At least you could try the experiment of no hanging." "It might cost too much. Murder would increase," reiterates society. "Formerly," replies the criminal, "many crimes were punished by death that now are not; and yet those crimes have not increased. Not long since the whipping-post and branding-iron stood by the bar of courts of justice, and were often used, too. Yet their abolition has not multiplied the evils for which they were meted out. This, and much more, fully proves that it is by no means the dread of terrible punishment which prevents crime. And now allow me to ask you a few questions. Why are most modern executions private, so called, instead of pub-, lic ?" "Because," answers society, "the influence of the spectacle is degrading and anti-humanizing. As far as it goes, it begets a morbid and unhealthy feeling in the masses." "Suppose all the convicts," goes on the prisoner, "adjudged to die in one of your largest States, were kept together for two whole years, and then in the most public part of the land were hung up in a row-say twenty of them together-how would this do?" "God forbid!" answers society with a start." The public mind would revolt at so bloody and monstrous a deed. It could not be allowed!" "Is it anything less horrible," resumes the questioner, "in the deaths being singly and at intervals?" "I cannot say it is," answers so ciety. "Allow me to suppose a little more," continues the criminal, "that all the convicts to be hung in the whole republic for two years say two hundred, and that is a small estimate--were strangled at the same time, in full sight of every man, woman and child-all the remaining population. And suppose this were done periodically every two years. What say you to that?" The very thought sickens me," answers society, and the effect would be more terrible and blighting upon the national morals and the health of the popular heart, than it is any way pos sible to describe. No unnatural rites of the most barbarous and brutal nations of antiquity ever equalled this; and our name would always deserve to be written literally in characters of blood. The feeling of the sacredness of life would be utterly destroyed among us. Every fine and Christian faculty of our souls would be rooted away. In a few years, this hellish oblation becoming common, the idea of violent death would be the theme of laughter and ribald jesting. In all the conduct and opinions of men, in their every-day business, and in their private meditations, so terrible an institution would some way, in some method of its influence, be seen operating. What! two hundred miserable wretches at once! The tottering old, and the youth not yet arrived at manhood; women, too, and perhaps girls who are hardly more than children! The spot where such a deed should be periodically consummated would surely be cursed forever by God and all goodness. Some awful and poisonous desert it ought to be; though, however awful, it could but faintly image the desert such horrors must make of the heart of man, and the poison it would diffuse on his better nature." "And if all this appalling influence," says the murderer, "were really oper ating over you-not concentrated, but cut up in fractions and frittered here and there just as strong in its general effect, but not brought to a point, as in the case I have imagined—what would you then say ?" "Nay," replies society, with feverish haste," but the executions are now required to be private." "Many are not," rejoins the other; "and as to those that are nominally so, where everybody reads newspapers, and every newspaper seeks for graphic accounts of these executions, such things can never be private. What a small proportion of your citizens are eye-wit nesses of things done in Congress; yet they are surely not private, for not a word officially spoken in the Halls of the Capitol, but is through the press made as public as if every American's ear were within hearing distance of the speaker's mouth. The whole spectacle of these two hundred executions is more faithfully seen, and much more deliberately dwelt upon, through the printed narratives, than if people beheld it with their bodily eyes, and then no more. Print preserves it. It passes from hand to hand, and even boys and girls are imbued with its spirit and horrid essence. Your legislators have forbidden public executions; they must go farther. They must forbid the relation of them by tongue, letter, or picture; for your physical sight is not the only avenue through which the subtle virus will reach you. Nor is the effect lessened because it is more covert and more widely diffused. Rather, indeed, the reverse. As things are, the masses take it for granted that the system and its results are right. As I have supposed them to be, though the nature would remain the same, the difference of the form would present the monstrous evil in a vivid and utterly new light before men's eyes." "To all this," says soceity, "I answer" what? What shall it be, thou particular reader, whose eyes now dwell on my fanciful dialogue? Give it for thyself and if it be indeed an answer, thou hast a logic of most surpassing art. O, how specious is the shield thrown over wicked actions, by invoking the Great Shape of Society in their defence! How that which is barbarous, false, or selfish for an individual becomes singularly proper when sanctioned by the legislature, or a supposed national policy! How deeds wicked in a man are thus applauded in a number of men! What makes a murder the awful crime all ages have considered it? The friend and foe of hanging will unite in the reply-Because it destroys that cunning principle of vitality which no human agency can replace-invades the prerogative of God, for God's is the only power that can give life and offers a horrid copy for the rest of mankind. Lo! thou lover of strangling! with what a keen razor's sharpness does every word of this reply cut asunder the threads of that argument which defends thy cause! The very facts which render murder frightful crime, der hanging a frightful punishment. To carry out the spirit of such a system, when a man maims another, the law should maim him in return. In the unsettled districts of our western states, it is said that in brutal fights the eyes of the defeated are sometimes torn bleeding from their sockets. The rule which justifies the taking of life, demands gouging out of eyes as a legal penalty too. I have one point else to touch upon, and then no more. There has, about this point, on the part of those who favor hanging, been such a bold, impudent effrontery-such a cool sneering defiance of all those greater lights which make the glory of this age over the shame of the dark ages-a prostitution so foul of names and influences so awfully sacred-that I tremble this moment with passion, while I treat upon it. I speak of founding the whole breadth and strength of the hanging system, as many do, on the Holy Scriptures. The matter is too extensive to be argued fully, in the skirts of an essay; and I have therefore but one suggestion to offer upon it, though words and ideas rush and swell upon my utterance. When I read in the records of the past how Calvin burned Servetus at Geneva, and found his defence in the Biblewhen I peruse the reign of the English Henry 8th, that great champion of Protestantism, who, after the Reformation, tortured people to death, for refusing to acknowledge his spiritual supremacy, and pointed to the Scriptures as his authority-when, through the short reign of Edward 6th, another Protestant sovereign, and of the Bloody Mary, a Catholic one, I find the most barbarous cruelties and martyrdoms inflicted in the name of God and his Sacred Word-I shudder and grow sick with pity. Still I remember the gloomy ignorance of the law of love that prevailed then, and the greater palliations for bigotry and religious folly. I bethink me how good it is that the spirit of such horrors, the blasphemy which prostitutes God's law to be their excuse, and the darkness of superstition which applauded them, have all passed away. But in these days of greater clearness, when clergymen call for sanguinary punishments in the name of the Gospel-when, chased from point to point of human policy, they throw themselves on the supposed necessity of hanging in order to gratify and satisfy Heaven-when, instead of Christian mildness and love, they demand that LUIGI PORTA perfectly stupified, looked at Ginevra; she had become as white as a marble statue, and remained standing with her eyes riveted on the door through which her father and mother had disappeared. There was something so awful in their silent departure, that she felt seized with terror, and probably for the first time in her life experienced the sentiment of fear. She clasped her hands, and pressing them convalsively together, exclaimed in a voice so low and broken that none but a lover's ear would have distinguished the words "Oh, God! what misery in one single word!" "I am only surprised, Ginevra, because you appear terrified. But in the name of our love, what have I said?" asked Luigi Porta. "My father," replied she, "has never spoken to me of our deplorable his tory, and I was too young when I left Corsica to know it." "Is it possible that our families were enemies?" asked Luigi, trembling. "Yes; I have learnt by questioning my mother, that the Portas had murdered my brothers and burnt our house, and my father massacred their whole family. How did you survive ?-you, whom he thought he had tied to a bedpost before setting fire to the house?" "I do not know," replied Luigi; "at six years old I was taken to Genoa, to the house of an old man named Colonna. No account of my family was ever given me. I only knew that I was an orphan, without fortune, and that Colonna was my guardian. I bore his name until I entered the service, when it became necessary to prove who I was, and only then the old Colonna informed me that insignificant as I was, and hardly emerging from childhood, I yet had enemies. He advised me never to bear any name but that of Luigi in order to escape them, and I have always done so." Go, go, Luigi!" exclaimed Ginevra. "I will go with you. As long as you are under my father's roof you are safe; but take good heed to yourself, for as soon as you leave its shelter you will be surrounded with peril. My father has two Corsicans in his service, and if he does not himself attempt your life, they will." "Ginevra," said he, "is this hereditary hatred to come between us?" The young girl smiled sadly, and drooped her head. She presently raised it proudly and said, "Oh, Louis, I must feel very strong in the purity and truth of our sentiments to walk without faltering in the path that lies before me; but life and life-long happiness depends upon it. Does it not?" |