he homes of
the patients than in public hospitals. But if by the removal of patients
to hospitals the number of cases may be greatly diminished, and the
contagion speedily arrested, this removal is the right of the
community,--yet not under circumstances of needless privation and hardship,
not without the best appliances of comfort, care, and skill which money
can procure; for the public can be justified in the exercise of such a
right, only by the extension of the most generous offices of humanity to
those who are imperilled for the public good.

It is only on similar grounds that the *death-penalty for murder* can be
justified. The life of the very worst of men should be sacrificed only for
the preservation of life; for if it be unsafe to leave them at liberty,
they may be kept under restraint and duress, without being wholly cut off
from the means of enjoyment and improvement. The primeval custom of the
earlier nations required the nearest kinsman of the murdered man to kill
the murderer with his own hand, and in so doing to shed his blood, which
was believed to have a mysterious efficacy in expiating the crime. This
form of revenge was greatly checked and restricted by the institutions of
Moses; it fell into disuse among the Jews, with their growth in
civilization; and was certainly included in the entire repeal of the law
of retaliation by Jesus Christ.(5)

But if with the dangerous classes of men the dread of capital punishment
is a dissuasive from crimes of violence, so that the number of murders is
less, and the lives of peaceable citizens are safer, than were murder
liable to some milder penalty, then it is the undoubted right of the
public to confiscate the murderer's right to life, and thus to sacrifice
the smaller number of comparatively worthless lives for the security of
the larger number of lives that may be valuable to the community. Or again
if, by the profligate use of the pardoning power, the murderer sentenced
to perpetual imprisonment will probably be let loose upon society
unreformed, and with passions which may lead to the repetition of his
crime, it is immeasurably more fitting that he be killed, than that he be
preserved to do farther mischief. Yet again, if there be in the
death-penalty for murder an educational force,--if by means of it each new
generation is trained in the greater reverence for human life, and the
greater detestation and horror of the crime by which it is destroyed,--then
is