athsome of all conceivable sins.
They will hold, I anticipate, that a certain portion of the
population--the small minority, for example, afflicted with
indisputably transmissible diseases, with transmissible mental
disorders, with such hideous incurable habits of mind as the craving for
intoxication--exists only on sufferance, out of pity and patience, and
on the understanding that they do not propagate; and I do not foresee
any reason to suppose that they will hesitate to kill when that
sufferance is abused. And I imagine also the plea and proof that a grave
criminal is also insane will be regarded by them not as a reason for
mercy, but as an added reason for death. I do not see how they can think
otherwise on the principles they will profess.

The men of the New Republic will not be squeamish, either, in facing or
inflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense of the
possibilities of life than we possess. They will have an ideal that will
make killing worth the while; like Abraham, they will have the faith to
kill, and they will have no superstitions about death. They will
naturally regard the modest suicide of incurably melancholy, or diseased
or helpless persons as a high and courageous act of duty rather than a
crime. And since they will regard, as indeed all men raised above a
brutish level do regard, a very long term of imprisonment as infinitely
worse than death, as being, indeed, death with a living misery added to
its natural terror, they will, I conceive, where the whole tenor of a
man's actions, and not simply some incidental or impulsive action, seems
to prove him unfitted for free life in the world, consider him
carefully, and condemn him, and remove him from being. All such killing
will be done with an opiate, for death is too grave a thing to be made
painful or dreadful, and used as a deterrent from crime. If deterrent
punishments are used at all in the code of the future, the deterrent
will neither be death, nor mutilation of the body, nor mutilation of the
life by imprisonment, nor any horrible things like that, but good
scientifically caused pain, that will leave nothing but a memory. Yet
even the memory of overwhelming pain is a sort of mutilation of the
soul. The idea that only those who are fit to live freely in an orderly
world-state should be permitted to live, is entirely against the use of
deterrent punishments at all. Against outrageous conduct to children or
women, perhaps, or for v