ESSAYS, &c.

I.

SACREDNESS OF HUMAN LIFE.

Suicide-Expediency.

'The power over human life is the sole prerogative of Him who gave it. Human laws, therefore, are in rebellion against this prerogative when they transfer it to human hands.' DR. RUSH.

OUR first inquiry will be respecting the authority for Capital Punishment. We do not intend to take an extensive view of this part of our subject, for there are many other considerations which would be more interesting to the general reader.

The reader should remember that the great object of our labor will be to show the injustice of Capital Punishments. The disposal of a prisoner is a matter for a work on another plan. Take away first this cruel, sanguinary law, and then let benevolence and justice do their work.

We wish to establish, clearly, that life is sacred, inalienable, a gift from Heaven. And even our Declara- . tion of Rights admits this great truth. Settle this great question forever, and then society will begin to improve; humanity will be respected, and the criminal will be looked on with pity as a man and a brother.

It has been said, that society is a compact, and that each individual must give up some portion of his

rights to the government under which he lives. Mr. Rantoul contends, however, that there is no such compact. 'It belongs to those,' he says, 'who claim for society the rightful power of life and death over its members, as a consequence of the social compact, to show in that compact the express provisions which convey that power. But it cannot be pretended that there are, or ever were, such provisions. It is argued, as boldly as strangely, that this right is to be implied from the nature of the compact. It may seem unnecessary to reply to such an assumption; but it has often been advanced, and for that reason deserves our notice. In point of fact, there is no social compact actually entered into by the members of society. It is a convenient fiction-a mere creature of the imagination-a form of expression often used to avoid long and difficult explanations of the real nature of the relation between the body politic and its individual members. This relation is not, strictly speaking, that of a compact. It is not by our voluntary consent that we become, each one of us, parties to it. The mere accident of birth first introduced us, and made us subject to its arrangements, before we were, in any sense, free agents. After we had grown to the age of freemen, and had a right to a voice in the common concerns, what alternatives had we then left? Simply these. Resistance to the social compact, as it is called, under the prospect of producing ruin, confusion, anarchy, slaughter almost without bounds, and finally ending in a new form of the social compact, much more objectionable than that which had been destroyed, if the resistance should prove successful: should it fail of success, incurring the penalty of treason, a cruel death, to such as have not been fortunate

enough to fall in the field of battle. Flight from the social compact, that is to say, flight not only from one's home, friends, kindred, language and country, but from among civilized men, perhaps, it may be said, from the fellowship of the human race. Or, lastly, submission to the social compact, as we find it, taking the chance of our feeble endeavors to amend it, or improve the practice under it. To this result, almost every man feels compelled by the circumstances in which he finds himself; circumstances so strong as to force from an inspired apostle the declaration, though he wrote under the tyrant Nero, a monster of depravity, "the powers that be are ordained of God; whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God; and they that resist shall receive unto themselves damnation." "

But admitting all that the most strenuous advocates contend for, respecting the social compact, the question returns. Can the individual give to society a right which was never conferred on him by his Creator? Has any one a right to take his own life? 'Every Christian,' says Mr. Rantoul, 'must answer, no. A man holds his life as a tenant at will,-not indeed of society, who did not and cannot give it, or renew it, and have, therefore, no right to take it away, but of that Almighty Being whose gift life is, who sustains and continues it, to whom it belongs, and who alone has the right to reclaim his gift whenever it shall seem good in his sight. A man may not surrender up his life until he is called for. May he then make a contract with his neighbor, that in such or such a case his neighbor shall kill him? Such a contract, if executed, would involve the one party in the guilt of suicide, and the other in the guilt of murder. If a man may not say to his next neighbor,

"When I have burned your house in the night time, or wrested your purse from you on the highway, or broken into your house in the night, with an iron crow, to take a morsel of meat for my starving child, do you seize me, shut me up a few weeks, and then bring me out and strangle me; and in like case, if your turn comes first, I will serve you in the same way,"—would such an agreement between ten neighbors be any more valid or justifiable? No. Nor if the number were a hundred, instead of ten, who should form this infernal compact, nor if there should be six hundred thousand or seven hundred thousand, or even fourteen, millions, who should so agree, would this increase of the number of partners vary one hair's breadth the moral character of the transaction. If this execution of the contract be not still murder on the one side, and suicide on the other, what precise number of persons must engage in it, in order that what was criminal before may become innocent, not to say virtuous; and upon what hitherto unheard of principles of morality is an act of murder in an individual, or a small corporation, converted into an act of justice whenever another subscriber has joined the association for mutual sacrifice? It is a familiar fact, in the history of mankind, that great corporations will do, and glory in, what the very individuals composing them would shrink from or blush at; but how does the division of the responsibility transform vice into virtue, or diminish the amount of any given crime? The command, "Thou shalt not kill," applies to individual men as members of an association, quite as peremptorily as in their private capacity.'

Suicide has been maintained by some writers, both in ancient and modern times. We have met with a French author, who, to sustain it, offers the following

view: 'I do not,' says he, 'regard as a very serious objection that pretended prohibition of suicide, whence it has been argued that we cannot dispose of human life. After Rousseau's admirable letters on suicide, he must be a bold man who would venture an off-hand opinion on such a serious question.

'When my coat straightens me, I throw it off. my house does not suit me, I quit it. Why should I not abandon life?

'It is true, the savage may starve, or freeze, rather than kill himself; but yet he kills his venerable father, with his own hand, to save him from suffering under a decaying constitution, and the pangs of a lingering death.

'Besides, to start from a questionable point to establish the point in question, is only to settle one doubt by another.

"The objection is a relic of the middle age, when the law punished suicide as a crime. Those punishments have been erased from our statutes. We cannot, therefore, admit that a principle which has been excluded from our criminal legislation, should continue to constitute one of its elements.'*

This reasoning will appear very singular to an American legislator. The author evidently felt the force of the objection, that man, having not the right

* 'Je ne considère pas comme une objection bien grave la pretendue defense d'attenter à notre propre vie, d'où l'on conclut que nous ne pouvons pas davantage disposer de celle de nos semblables.

'Lorsqu'on a lu les admirables lettres de Jean Jacques sur le suicide, il devient téméraire de trancher légèrement une aussi grave question. ‘Quand un vêtement me gêne, je le quitte; quand une habitation m'incommode, j'en sors. Pourquoi ne pourrais-je pas sortir de la vie? 'On parle du sauvage, qui souvent meurt de faim, de froid, et ne se tue point lui meme.

'La chose est possible; mais on oublie que ce même sauvage donne,