There were many clever people at the
party and much interesting conversation. They talked among other
things of capital punishment. The guests, among them not a few
scholars and journalists, for the most part disapproved of capital
punishment. They found it obsolete as a means of punishment, unfitted
to a Christian State and immoral. Some of them thought that capital
punishment should be replaced universally by life-imprisonment.
"I don't agree with you," said the host. "I myself have experienced
neither capital punishment nor life-imprisonment, but if one may judge
_a priori_, then in my opinion capital punishment is more moral and
more humane than imprisonment. Execution kills instantly,
life-imprisonment kills by degrees. Who is the more humane
executioner, one who kills you in a few seconds or one who draws the
life out of you incessantly, for years?"
"They're both equally immoral," remarked one of the guests, "because
their purpose is the same, to take away life. The State is not God. It
has no right to take away that which it cannot give back, if it should
so desire."
Among the company was a lawyer, a young man of about twenty-five.
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