Spirit of the Times Batavia, Genesee County, New York State January 3-1843 -cont'd.- Capital Punishment--it's Social Responsibility. That, at which the better part of humanity revolts, it will be difficult to execute. No law odious from its barbarity, can long withstand the force and pressure of enlightened sentiment, and fair, sober discussion. Such a law is blood for blood, entirely out of joint with the genius of the age, and that general political sympathy of brother with brother. In this fraternal republic all men are proudly sensible of their direct agency in making and administering their laws, and should be cautiously alive to the danger of executing bad ones. We do not fraternize to take life, but to protect it. It is no part of public policy, nor right, to imitate crime, but prevent it. Where do we get the right to murder a man because he had murdered? Republican Rome existed five hundred years without the bloody code, and these were her most palmy and flourishing days. Under Roman tyrants this humane code sank, and with it the greatness of Rome, and the red, ensanguined laws of the basest of men smeared their statute pages. As all tyrants are cowards, and cowards tyrants, it became necessary for their own peace to be cruel. By such a lesson, we should profit, not follow; while the pure and lofty example of the Republic, where the people were the law makers, the philanthropist will delight to imitate. When we see the ancient Roman, the Pagan Roman, duly appreciating the right conception of the majesty of man; there is something deeply humiliating to the Christian American, to feel and see, that he is still bound to the ear of Jewish tradition--that the cruel coeds of that scattered and disposed people for their wickedness, still hold the mighty sway of nations of freemen in its grasp, as absolute masters, even to life and death. This doubtless, arises out of too much of the impulsive, and too little of the thinking man. We should beware lest the divine sympathies of our nature be stifled under a bigoted, irreflective education, and leave us regretful of our social responsibility. A man may err the highest authority has enjoined us to let it be on the side of mercy and humanity. As all may need mercy from his fellow, none should grudge it. In this country all our institutions and laws are the creatures of public voice. In one way and another every individual is an actor in their adoption; be they just, equitable, and humane, he takes merit; be they the contrary, he must take the consequences. One man cannot shake the wrong from his own skirts, and pin it to another. Each for himself, may ask an excuse, but there is none to grant it; he is left to his own solitary conscience for converse and apology, but the tribunal denies the pardon. There is no escape--no shifting the terrible responsibility of judicial homicide, from the individual to the community: each are liable, as it takes each and every to compose the aggregate. Responsibility of bad laws and injustice rests somewhere; if not on each--where? Where do we go for reform and alteration of odious laws, but to ourselves, the highest, only sovereignty we recognise? Our legislators, our judges, juries and sheriffs are our instruments to do our bidding, for our social convenience. This shifts not the condition of things; they only act, while we the people direct, and when we direct them to commit offences at which the affections moan, we are self-convited and they acquitted. In this country a man must be his own comforter of the injury has done another by a mutually bad law. Every elector is a partnership ruler, and he must stand or fall by his good or bad ruling. The monarch here is the inmaterial intelligence, as dispersed as the number of intelligent and responsible beings, or electors; here is no local point which the oppressed may attack for its faults, and clamor for redress; no crowned head dispensing ruin or blessings upon subjects, according to his vasillating caprice and whim of an hour. We have no such fountain of faults to lay our grievances upon, it could not live an hour in our atmosphere. Our crowns are thoughts, sober, sedate, regulated by virtue, morality, and the kind emanations of the heart, despising useless severity, however venerable with practice or antiquated by time. As a people we have assumed to take our destinies into our own hands, and have marked our future course in independence of the arbitrary and stale dicta of rude and uncivilized ages, adopted without a reason of which we know, nor having application to our condition; yet strange as it may seem, the chains of those times are upon our limbs and their superstitions our masters, with an origin of four thousand years from our existence. When common sense is really free, such things will pass for what they are worth, not till then. There is no reason why we should be absurd. Why do we tamely submit to Jewish rule at this late day? The stickler for old things and ignorant times may answer. The individual denies himself the right to take human life, yet claims it as one of the community. We admit in our legislation no mystic powers, no divine rights, such as the juggles of monarchs once charmed their stupid wassals with, and awed them to endure the iron rod of this sham divine right inflicted by the heartless prince robber. Such trickery has melted before the concentrated rays of enlightened intellect, the only jewel worth man's possession. Wherefore then delights come to a community, if the individual has not the inherent right? Does the community get any rights, but from the aggregate of individual rights? We think not. Then if the individual has not the right to take human life, from what, or who does the community obtain it? Is it not a cruel and solemn mockery to assert and enforce it? Is it unpardonable hypocrisy to affect a shudder at savage barbarism, while we, like a pack of ravenous wolves, by the powers of the state, fall upon a single individual and strangle him to death with the cold cord of the hangman. He did a deed which human nature abhors and community repeats it. This savage practice must be abolished, and our pen shall not tire while it lasts. *** submitted by Linda Schmidt *********************************************