end of earthly troubles, cares, and sufferings.
In vain," he continues, "does the multitude of suicides show us daily
that death is no evil, and therefore no punishment; for the men who thus
abridge their days manifestly prefer death to the endurance of the evils
of life."

It has been said, that "he who can look at death starts at no shadows."
And certainly, reason on the matter how you will, and prove life to be
as worthless as you please, if a man can defy death, and solicit it,
there is no other punishment that can be effective. It would be all but
impossible to prevent a criminal, if so resolved, from laying violent
hands upon himself; and altogether impossible to prevent him from
contemplating suicide as his last resort in case of detection, and so
nullifying the threat of any other punishment. There is no hold whatever
on the man in whom the love of life, or the fear of death, is really
extinct. But we are far from thinking that Seneca and the Stoics have
yet made so deep an impression on mankind that there is a very general
indifference to death, especially to a death inflicted by others--the
ignominious sentence of the law.

Again, this author objects, as some others have done, to the punishment
of death, because it is incapable of an adjustment to the degrees of
guilt. What punishment is? Or how can any tribunal determine on degrees
of moral guilt? It is not a criminal, it is a crime, that the law
punishes. To determine between two thieves, which had the better motive,
which had the least _of thief in him_, is not the function of a judge,
nor could he perform it, if imposed upon him. It has been remarked by
those who have had wide opportunities of judging--and the annals of
criminal jurisprudence support the observation--that murderers, taken as
a class, are not, as men, the worst order of criminals. Some sudden
impulse, or some one obstinate desire, got the better of their reason;
or it might happen, that the motive for committing a great crime was
not of so dark a dye as that which often induces to one of less
turpitude. And yet neither our author, nor any one else, would hesitate
to accord to the crime of murder the very severest penalty that stands
upon the code.

But M. Zschokke's main argument against the reasonableness and justice
of death-punishment is this, that every man has an original
imprescriptible right, prior to, and in the face of all society--_to be
a man_--"mensch zu sein"--"to develope h