A Saturnalia of Bunk. H. L. Mencken
the reins, it may be dug up and put into effect. The rise of democracy during the last 400 years has brought about a correlative augmentation of judicial sentimentality, and the result is that all the ingenious and varied punishments of a more clear-sighted age have disappeared. Today we have but two ways of punishing crime. One is that of killing the criminal—a punishment reserved for a few extra-heinous crimes and (with an accidental exception now and then) for poor men. The other way is that of compelling the criminal to live, for a definite time, in some given place. This last is the punishment commonly called imprisonment. It is a real punishment only to those criminals who hold to the old delusion that the joys of freedom outweigh its responsibilities, or to those who find the house in which they are confined less comfortable than the house they have left.
The so-called punishment of fining the criminal is really no punishment at all. On the contrary, it is a means of evading punishment—a scheme whereby the occasional criminal who can afford it is permitted to escape the just penalty of his crime by paying a bribe. The Chinese culprit bribes the judge personally; the American culprit bribes the judge as wiskinski4 for the community. The effect is exactly the same in the two cases; it makes no difference to the culprit what role the judge professes to play. All he knows is that, having money, he may go free, whereas if he were without money he would have to go to jail.
What we need, of course, is a revival of the fluent and scientific punishments of the feudal ages—punishments which bred ingenuity and honesty in judges, and worked exact justice. A medieval judge had to keep his wits about him. His highest duty was that of making the punishment fit the crime. If, having one day punished a perjurer by cutting a schnitzel from the fellow’s tongue, he next day essayed to visit the same punishment upon a pickpocket, a kidnapper or a strolling actor, the superiors to whom he reported would probably set him down an osseocaput and take away his commission. He had to be alert—or quit.
But today a judge labors under no such incentive to intelligence. He is esteemed, not as he displays ingenuity, but as he suppresses ingenuity. He works entirely by rote. If the murderer before him is a pauper and friendless, he must pronounce sentence of death. If the murderer is rich and well-lawyered, he must grant the classical series of stays and appeals. If the drunkard has no money—seven days in jail. If the drunkard has a wad—a slice of that wad for the communal tin-bank. And in dealing with all intermediate crimes, he can impose only imprisonment, with the occasional alternative of accepting a bribe from an extra-opulent rogue. His sole discretion lies in determining the length of the imprisonment, and even here rigid laws limit his range of choice, and other laws condition and modify his choice after it is made.
How much better and saner the old system! How much better and saner the plan of Marshal Farnan! Cut off a pickpocket’s fingers and you at once make it impossible for him ever to pick pockets again. Here is the ideal combination of punishment and prevention. The crime is penalized and the criminal is cured. Imprisonment, it must be obvious, never cures a pickpocket. All it does is to forbid him, for a limited time, to practice his profession. As soon as he is liberated he goes back to that profession, and to it he clings until the last horn blows.
If, now, picking pockets is a profession that we are justified in suppressing, just as we have suppressed piracy, then it certainly follows that we should adopt the means best adapted to suppressing it. The physical disablement of the pickpocket is that means. It is not only the best means, but also the only means. Moral suasion will not do the trick. Imprisonment will not do it. Espionage will not do it. But mutilation will do it—and therefore Marshal Farnan, as a police officer of long experience and as a man of common sense, is in favor of mutilation.
But only, of course, theoretically. He knows very well, as all of us know, that the Legislature of Maryland will never adopt his plan. Sentiment stands against it—and sentiment is always an ass. We do not hesitate to send pickpockets to jail and there kill them in the shops, or to send them to the penitentiary and there convert them into consumptives, but at the simple, efficient, cleanly, humane and aseptic device of chopping off their watchhooks our virtuosi of virtue stand aghast. [28 December 1911]
A HANGING
Attending at the City Jail yesterday morning, as the guest of the Hon. Bernard J. Lee, to witness the official exitus of a gentleman of color, I was surprised to find no suffragettes at the ringside. In view of their late advocacy of the wholesale hanging of sinners and their plain promise to begin the business as soon as they are in power, which will undoubtedly be very soon, I was full of hope that some of them would be on the scene to observe and master the somewhat ticklish technique of strangulation. But, as I have said, I could find none in the select company of scientists present, and the Hon. Mr. Lee assured me that none were concealed behind the draperies of the lethal chamber.
A pity, to be sure. It was a first-class union hanging and would have given the sweet girls valuable tips for future use. For I assume, of course, that they will participate personally, and even joyfully, in that copious slaughter of the licentious of which they now but dream. When women go to the polls and vote for the practical extermination of the male sex, and then go to the Legislature and put that enterprise into laws, and then sit upon juries and condemn the guilty to the noose, it will be their plain duty, not to say their lofty privilege, to carry the thing through to its affecting finish upon the scaffold. They will do it, I daresay, because they will want to do it, and they will have to do it because few men will be left, after a while, to do it for them. A matter of simple mathematics: on the one hand they tell us that 90 per cent. of all men are scoundrels, and on the other hand they argue that all scoundrels should be exposed to the utmost rigors of the law.
But they missed their chance yesterday, and so I hasten to supply them with particulars of the art, in fear that they may get some friend of mine as their first victim, and disgrace him by bungling him. I pass over, as irrelevant, the affecting preliminaries—the awakening of the condemned by his death-watch; his riotous meal of bacon, fried eggs, French fried potatoes, stewed tomatoes, celery, pound cake and drip coffee; the last visit of his spiritual adviser; the singing of the parting hymn; the composition of dying messages; the goodbys to deputy wardens, newspaper reporters and fellow-prisoners—and proceed at once to the execution proper.
It begins with the fateful footfall of the Sheriff in the corridor. “Come, Johnson, your time is up!” The prisoner rises, the cell door is swung open and the first part of the march is begun. It is to the warden’s office, a deputy sheriff leading and guards walking on each side of the condemned. There a crowd of men has gathered—perhaps 30 in all—and as the little procession enters they take off their hats and crane their necks. The prisoner wears a new suit of black clothes and a low, low collar. He stands up in the middle of the room, unsupported and silent, and the deputy sheriffs begin to strap his arms.
First, his wrists are brought together and a long strap is wound around and around them and buckled tight. Then his elbows are drawn back and strapped together behind his back. Then a gruesome black gown, with a monkish sort of black hood, is shaken from its wrappings and put on over his head, with the hood hanging down. The gown has been used before. The straps have been used before. The deputy sheriffs have been there before. It is a very swift and businesslike proceeding.
Now comes the march to the scaffold. Ahead go several deputies, and then follows the condemned with his spiritual adviser. The rest follow in disorder. Through the jail, down the jail yard, and so to the actual place of execution. The condemned, his lips moving, his eyes staring, looks up and sees the great beam, the clumsy trap, the dangling noose. A long flight of steep steps, perhaps 18 or 20. He must walk up them with his arms tied and his long gown flopping about his feet. If he stumbles, his spiritual adviser lends him a hand and a deputy pushes him from behind. The crowd groups itself around the base of the scaffold. Nobody says anything.
Once on the platform the condemned is led to the trap and there makes ready for his farewell to the world. Two heavy boards are laid across the trap, and on these the busy deputies stand, so that in case the trap falls prematurely they will not go through. One of them, kneeling, straps the feet and knees of the condemned together. Another reaches up for the noose, draws it down and deftly slips it over the culprit’s head. The rough rope scratches him: at its touch he winces. It is drawn tightly around his neck, with the huge knot under his left ear. The black hood is pulled