he individual whose life is attacked says: "Desist or be shot." To be
effective the warning in either case must be more than an idle threat.
Even the most unearthly reasoner among the gallows-downing unfortunates
would hardly expect to frighten away an assassin who knew the pistol
to be unloaded. Of course these queer illogicians can not be made to
understand that their position commits them to absolute non-resistance
to any kind of aggression, and that is fortunate for the rest of us,
for if as Christians they frankly and consistently took that ground we
should be under the miserable necessity of respecting them.

We have good reason to hold that the horrible prevalence of murder in
this country is due to the fact that we do not execute our laws--that
the death penalty is threatened but not inflicted--that the pistol is
not loaded. In civilized countries, where there is enough respect for
the laws to administer them, there is enough to obey them. While man
still has as much of the ancestral brute as his skin can hold widiout
cracking we shall have thieves and demagogues and anarchists and
assassins and persons with a private system of lexicography who define
hanging as murder and murder as mischance, and many another disagreeable
creation, but in all this welter of crime and stupidity are areas where
human life is comparatively secure against the human hand. It is at
least a significant coincidence that in these the death penalty for
murder is fairly well enforced by judges who do not derive any part of
their authority from those for whose restraint and punishment they hold
it. Against the life of one guiltless person the lives of ten thousand
murderers count for nothing; their hanging is a public good, without
reference to the crimes that disclose their deserts. If we could
discover them by other signs than their bloody deeds they should be
hanged anyhow. Unfortunately we must have a death as evidence. The
scientists who will tell us how to recognize the potential assassin, and
persuade us to kill him, will be the greatest benefactor of his century.

What would these enemies of the gibbet have?--these lineal descendants
of the drunken mobs that pelted the hangmen at Tyburn Tree; this progeny
of criminals, which has so defiled with the mud of its animosity the
noble office of public executioner that even "in this enlightened
age" he shirks his high duty, entrusting it to a hidden or unnamed
subordinate? If murder is un