the question of capital punishment has been the subject of endless discussion and will probably never be settled so long as men believe in punishment. some states have abolished and then reinstated it; some have enjoyed capital punishment for long periods of time and finally prohibited the use of it. the reasons why it cannot be settled are plain. there is first of all no agreement as to the objects of punishment. next there is no way to determine the results of punishment. if the object is assumed it is a matter of conjecture as to what will be most likely to bring the result. if it could be shown that any form of punishment would bring the immediate result, it would be impossible to show its indirect result although indirect results are as certain as direct ones. even if all of this could be clearly proven, the world would be no nearer the solution. questions of this sort, or perhaps of any sort, are not settled by reason; they are settled by prejudices and sentiments or by emotion. when they are settled they do not stay settled, for the emotions change as new stimuli are applied to the machine.

a state may provide for life imprisonment in place of death. some especially atrocious murder may occur and be fully exploited in the press. public feeling will be fanned to a flame. bitter hatred will be aroused against the murderer. it is perfectly obvious to the multitude that if other men had been hanged for murder, this victim would not have been killed. a legislature meets before the hatred has had time to cool and the law is changed. again, a community may have capital punishment and nothing notable happens. now and then hangings occur. juries acquit because of the severity of the penalty. a feeling of shame or some bungling execution may arouse a community against it. a deep-seated doubt may arise as to the guilt of a man who has been put to death. the sentimental people triumph. the law is changed. nothing has been found out; no question has been settled; science has made no contribution; the public has changed its mind, or, speaking more correctly, has had another emotion and passed another law.

in the main, the controversy over capital punishment has been one between emotional and unemotional people. now and then the emotionalist is reinforced by some who have a religious conviction against capital punishment, based perhaps on the rather trite expression that "god gave life and only god should take it away." such a statement is plausible but not capable of proof. in the main religious people believe in capital punishment. the advocates of capital punishment dispose of the question by saying that it is the "sentimentalist" or, rather, the "maudlin sentimentalist" who is against it. sentimentalist really implies "maudlin."

but emotion too has its biological origin and is a subject of scientific definition. a really "sentimental" person, in the sense used, is one who has sympathy. this, in turn, comes from imagination which is probably the result of a sensitive nervous system, one that quickly and easily responds to stimuli. those who have weak emotions do not respond so readily to impressions. their assumption of superior wisdom has its basis only in a nervous system which is sluggish and phlegmatic to stimuli. such impressions as each system makes are registered on the brain and become the material for recollection and comparison, which go to form opinion. the correctness of the mental processes depends upon the correctness of the senses that receive the impression, the nerves that transmit the correctness of the registration, and the character of the brain. it does not follow that the stoic has a better brain than the despised "sentimentalist." either one of them may have a good one, and either one of them a poor one. still, charity and kindliness probably come from the sensitive system which imagines itself in the place of the object that it pities. all pity is really pain engendered by the feelings that translate one into the place of another. both hate and love are biologically necessary to life and its processes.

many people urge that the penalty of imprisonment for life would be all right if the culprit could be kept in prison during life, but in the course of time he is pardoned. this to me is an excellent reason why his life should be saved. it is proof that the feeling of hatred that inspired judge and jury has spent itself and that they can look at the murderer as a man. which decision is the more righteous, the one where hatred and fear affect the judgment 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 circle.

in the absence of any solid starting point on which an argument can be based; in the absence of any reliable figures; in the absence of any way to interpret the figures; in the absence of any way to ascertain the indirect results of judicial killings, even if the direct ones could be shown; in the impossibility through life, experience or philosophy of fixing relative values, the question must remain where it has always been, a conflict between the emotional and unemotional; the "sentimental" and the stolid; the imaginative and the unimaginative; the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. personally, being inclined to a purely mechanistic view of life and to the belief that all conduct is the result of certain stimuli upon a human machine, i can only say that the stimuli of seeing and reading of capital punishment, applied to my machine, is revolting and horrible. perhaps as the world improves, the sympathetic and imaginative nature will survive the stolid and selfish. at least one can well believe that this is the line of progress if there shall be progress, a matter still open to question and doubt.