udgment and sentence, or the one where these
emotions have spent their force?

Everyone who advocates capital punishment is really ashamed of the
practice for which he is responsible. Instead of urging public
executions, the most advanced and sensitive who believe in killing by
the state are now advocating that even the newspapers should not publish
the details and that the killing should be done in darkness and silence.
In that event no one would be deterred by the cruelty of the state. That
capital punishment is horrible and cruel is the reason for its
existence. That men should be taught not to take life is the purpose of
judicial killings. But the spectacle of the state taking life must tend
to cheapen it. This must be evident to all who believe in suggestion.
Constant association and familiarity tend to lessen the shock of any
act however revolting. If men regarded the murderer as one who acted
from some all-sufficient cause and who was simply an instrument in an
endless sequence of cause and effect, would anyone say he should be put
to death?

It is not easy to estimate values correctly. It may be that life is not
important. Nature seems extravagantly profligate in her giving and
pitiless in her taking away. Yet death has something of the same shock
today that was felt when men first gazed upon the dead with awe and
wonder and terror. Constantly meeting it and seeing it and procuring it
will doubtless make it more commonplace. To the seasoned soldier in the
army it means less than it did before he became a soldier. Probably the
undertaker thinks less of death than almost any other man. He is so
accustomed to it that his mind must involuntarily turn from its horror
to a contemplation of how much he makes out of the burial. If the
civilized savages have their way and make hangings common, we shall
probably recover from some of our instinctive fear of death and the
extravagant value that we place on life. The social organism is like the
individual organism: it can be so often shocked that it grows accustomed
and weary and no longer manifests resistance or surprise.

So far as we can reason on questions of life and death and the effect
of stimuli upon human organisms, the circle is like this: Frequent
executions dull the sensibilities toward the taking of life. This makes
it easier for men to kill and increases murders, which in turn increase
hangings, which in turn increase murders, and so on, around the vicious
c