it is not easy in the days of a milder administration of penal laws than a century ago the most sanguine could have dreamed of to do full justice to those who laboured, as beccaria and his friends did, at the peril of their lives and liberties, for those very immunities which we now enjoy. we cannot conceive that it should ever have been necessary to argue against torture, or that it should have been a bold thing to do so; still less can we conceive that it should ever have had its defenders, or that men should have been contented with the sophism, that it was indeed an evil, but an evil which was necessary and inevitable.

the very success of beccaria’s work has so accustomed us to its result that we are apt to regard it, as men regard a splendid cathedral in their native town, with very little recognition of its claims to admiration. the work is there, they see it, they live under its shadow; they are even ready to boast of it; but[30] what to them is the toil and risk of its builders, or the care and thought of its architects? it may be said that this indifference is the very consummation beccaria would most have desired, as it is the most signal proof of the success of his labour. so signal, indeed, has been that success, that already the atrocities which men in those days accepted as among the unalterable conditions of their existence, or resigned themselves to as the necessary safeguards of society, have become so repulsive to the world’s memory, that men have agreed to hide them from their historical consciousness by seldom reading, writing, or speaking of their existence. and this is surely a fact to be remembered with hopefulness, when we hear an evil like war with all its attendant atrocities, defended nowadays by precisely the same arguments which little more than a hundred years ago were urged on behalf of torture, but which have proved nevertheless insufficient to keep it in existence.

it may be asked, how far was beccaria the first to protest against the cruelty and absurdity of torture? to this it must be replied that although actually he was not the first, he was the first to do so with effect. the difference between previous writers on the subject and beccaria is the difference between a man whose ideas are in advance of those of his age and a man who raises the ideas of his age to a level with his[31] own. so early as the sixteenth century montaigne, in his ‘essay on conscience,’ had said plainly enough that the putting a man to the rack was rather a trial of patience than of truth; that pain was as likely to extort a false confession as a true one; and that a judge, by having a man racked that he might not die innocent, caused him to die both innocent and racked. also grevius clivensis wrote a work whilst in prison in amsterdam, in which he sought to prove that torture was iniquitous, fallacious, and unchristian.[17] this was published in 1624; and nearly a century later a jesuit, spee, wrote against the use of torture, as also against the cruel practices in force against witches.[18] and in later days montesquieu, twenty years before beccaria, had gone so far as to say that, since a civilised nation like england had abandoned torture without evil consequences, it was therefore unnecessary; but he followed the subject to no definite conclusion.

beccaria himself was ready enough to refer all his thoughts to french inspiration, and to lay aside all claim to originality, with respect to which d’alembert once wrote to him: ‘a man such as you has no need of a master, still less of a master like myself. you are like the titus curtius of tacitus, ex se natus, nor have your offspring any grandparent. a father like yourself is enough for them.’

[32]

but the honour of having been the first country to lay aside the use of torture undoubtedly belongs to england, just as the honour of having been the first in modern times to abolish capital punishment, except for political offences, belongs to russia; and the practical example thus afforded by our laws probably did more for the general abolition of the custom than any written treatise on the subject ever would have done alone. english and foreign jurists long delighted to honour the common law for its non-recognition of torture. but though torture was contrary to the common law, and even to magna charta, it was not contrary to prerogative; and until the commonwealth it was used as matter of course in all grave accusations at the mere discretion of the monarch and privy council.[19] therefore beccaria pointed to england as a country which did not use torture with more justice than grotius had done, who, when the rack was still in use amongst us, quoted england as a proof that people might safely live without torture.

it is of interest to trace some of the practical results which followed beccaria’s treatise during the thirty years that he lived after its publication; that is, from the year 1764 to 1794.

the country in which the first attempt was made to apply his principles to practice was russia, where catharine ii. was anxious to establish a uniform[33] penal code, based on the liberal ideas of the time, which then found more favour in st. petersburg than they did at paris. for this purpose in 1767 she summoned to moscow from all the provinces of russia those 652 deputies who formed the nearest approach in the history of that country to a russian parliament. in the instructions that were read to this assembly, as the basis for the proposed codification of the laws, the principles propounded were couched not only in the spirit but often in the very words of the author of the ‘crimes and punishments.’ the following are examples:—

laws should only be considered as a means of conducting mankind to the greatest happiness.

it is incomparably better to prevent crimes than to punish them.

the aim of punishment is not to torment sensitive beings.

all punishment is unjust that is unnecessary to the maintenance of public safety.

in methods of trial the use of torture is contrary to sound reason. humanity cries out against the practice and insists on its abolition.

judgment must be nothing but the precise text of the law, and the office of the judge is only to pronounce whether the action is contrary or conformable to it.

in the ordinary state of society the death of a citizen is neither useful nor necessary.

the following especially is from beccaria:—

[34]

would you prevent crimes, contrive that the laws favour less different orders of citizens than each citizen in particular. let men fear the laws and nothing but the laws. would you prevent crimes, provide that reason and knowledge be more and more diffused. to conclude: the surest but most difficult method of making men better is by perfecting education.[20]

although these instructions were not so much laws as suggestions of laws, it is obvious what their effect must have been when published and diffused throughout russia. that they were translated into latin, german, french, and italian proves the interest that was taken in europe by this first attempt to apply the maxims of philosophy to practical government.

in france beccaria’s book became widely popular, and many writers helped to propagate his ideas, such as servan, brissot, lacretelle, and pastoret. lacretelle attributes the whole impulse of criminal law reform to beccaria, while regretting that montesquieu had not said enough to attract general attention to the subject. his book is said to have so changed the spirit of the old french criminal tribunals, that, ten years before the revolution, they bore no resemblance to their former selves. all the younger magistrates gave their judgments more according to the principles of beccaria than according to the text of the law.[21][35] the result of the agitation appeared in the royal ordinances of 1780 and 1788, directed to the diminution of torture, the only reforms which preceded the revolution. it is said that the last time anyone was tortured in france was in the year 1788, the last year of the ancien régime. at the very beginning of the revolution more than a hundred different offences ceased to incur the penalty of death.

the most successful adoption of beccaria’s principles of punishment occurred in tuscany, under the grand duke leopold. when he ascended the ducal throne, the tuscans were the most abandoned people of all italy. robberies and murders were none the less frequent for all the gallows, wheels, and tortures which were employed to repress them. but leopold in 1786 resolved to try beccaria’s plan, for which purpose he published a code, proportioning punishments to crimes, abolishing mutilation and torture, reducing the number of acts of treason, lessening confiscations, destroying the right of asylum, and above all abolishing capital punishment even for murder. the result was, says a contemporary, that tuscany, from having been the land of the greatest crimes and villanies, became ‘the best ordered state of europe.’[22] during twenty years only five murders were committed in tuscany, whilst at rome, where death continued to be inflicted with great pomp, as[36] many as sixty were committed within the space of three months.[23]

torture was definitely and totally abolished in portugal in 1776, in sweden in 1786,[24] and in austria in 1789. in the latter country, indeed, it had been abolished by maria theresa sixteen years before in her german and polish provinces; and the penal code of joseph ii., published in 1785, was an additional tribute to the cause of reform. secret orders were even given to the tribunals to substitute other punishments for hanging, yet so that the general public should be unaware of the change. there was the greatest anxiety that it should not be thought that this change was out of any deference for beccaria or his school. ‘in the abolition of capital punishment,’ said kaunitz, ‘his majesty pays no regard at all to the principles of modern philosophers, who, in affecting a horror of bloodshed, assert that primitive justice has no right to take from a man that life which nature only can give him. our sovereign has only consulted his own conviction, that the punishment he wishes substituted for the capital penalty is more likely to be felt by reason of its duration, and therefore better fitted to inspire malefactors with terror.’

[37]

nor was it only in europe that beccaria’s influence thus prevailed, for as soon as the american colonies had shaken off their english connection they began to reform their penal laws. when the revolution began there were in pennsylvania nearly twenty crimes punishable by death, and within eighteen years of its close the penal code was thoroughly transformed, it being ordained in 1794 that no crime should any longer be capital but murder in the first degree. it is true that this was but a return to the principles adopted by penn on the settlement of the colony, but penn’s penal code was annulled by queen anne, and the english government insisted on a strict adherence to the charter from charles ii., which enjoined the retention of the statute and the common law of england. when, therefore, the new constitution was formed in 1776, the arguments of beccaria gave fresh life to the memories of penn.[25]

thus before his death beccaria saw torture almost entirely abolished in europe, and a general tendency spreading to follow the spirit of the changes he advocated in other details of criminal law. probably no other theorist ever lived to witness so complete an adoption of his principles in practice, or so thorough a transformation of the system he attacked. it is possible that he but gave body and voice to ideas of change already widely prevalent in his time; but the[38] merit of a man belongs none the less to himself, who changes the instability of public opinion into an active and solid force, and who gives distinct expression to the longings vaguely felt by a multitude.

but if the interest of beccaria’s chapter on torture is now merely historical, an interest that is actual still attaches to his advocacy of the total abolition of capital punishment, this being the cause with which his name is most generally associated, and for which it is likely to be longest remembered. previous writers, like montaigne, if they deprecated the excess or severity of the death penalty, never thought of urging that it should be abolished altogether.

there is an apparent discrepancy in beccaria’s first condemning death as too severe a punishment and then recommending lifelong servitude as one of more deterrent power; but beccaria would have said that the greater certainty of the latter more than compensated for the greater severity of the other. as regards the relative power of the two punishments, it probably varies in different individuals, some men having a greater dread of the one, and some of the other. the popular theory certainly goes too far, when it assumes that all men have a greater dread of the gallows than of anything else. when george iii. once granted a pardon to the female convicts in newgate on condition of their transportation to new south wales, though seventeen of them accepted[39] the offer, there were yet six who preferred death to a removal from their native country. it is also stated by howard that in denmark the punishment in cases of infanticide, namely, imprisonment for life, with labour and an annual whipping on the place of the crime, was ‘dreaded more than death,’ which it superseded as a punishment.

it is, however, probable that the frequency of any crime bears little or no relation to the punishment affixed to it. every criminal begins a new career, in which he thinks less of the nature of his punishment than of his chances of eluding it. neither tradition nor example count with him for much in his balance of the chances in his own favour. the law can never be so certain in its execution as it is uncertain in its application, and it is the examples of impunity, not of punishment, to which men turn when they violate the law. so that whether the punishment for murder be an excruciating death, as in ancient rome, or a mere fine, as in ancient england, the motives for escape are always the same, the means to effect it are always the same, and the belief in his power to effect it is correspondingly powerful in every criminal guilty of homicide.

even if we assume that death is absolutely the severest penalty devisable by the law, and that as a punishment for murder it is not too severe, it remains certain, that, relatively to the circumstances of a trial[40] for murder, to the reluctance of judges or juries to pass an irretrievable sentence, to their fear of error, to their conscientious regard for human life, it is really a much less terrible danger for a malefactor to face than a penalty which would justify fewer hopes of impunity.

nor are such scruples to convict unreasonable, when we consider the number who on apparently conclusive evidence have been falsely and irrevocably condemned to death. playgoers who have seen ‘the lyons mail’ will remember how barely lesurques, the parisian gentleman, escaped punishment for the guilt of dubosc, the robber and murderer. but the moral of the story is lost in the play, for lesurques actually was executed for the crime of dubosc, by reason of the strong resemblance he bore to him, the latter only receiving the due reward for his crimes after the innocent man had died as a common murderer on the scaffold. then there are cases in which, as in the famous case of calas, some one having committed suicide, some one else is executed as the murderer. that dead men tell no tales is as true of men hung as of men murdered, and the innocence of an executed man may be proved long afterwards or not at all.

where there is no capital punishment, as in michigan, a man’s innocence may be discovered subsequently to conviction, and justice done to him for the error of the law. such a case actually happened not long ago in michigan, where a prisoner’s innocence[41] was clearly proved after ten years’ imprisonment. where capital punishment exists, there is no such hope; nor is there any remedy if, as in the case of lewis, who was hung in 1831, another man thirty-three years afterwards confesses himself the murderer. it is impossible to preclude all chances of such errors of justice. illustrative of this is the story of the church organist near kieff, who murdered a farmer with a pistol he stole from a priest. after his crime he placed the pistol in the sacristy, and then, when he had prevented the priest from giving evidence against him by the act of confession, went and denounced the priest as the culprit. the priest, in spite of his protestations of innocence, was sentenced to hard labour for life; and when, twenty years afterwards, the organist confessed his guilt on his deathbed, and the priest’s liberation was applied for, it was found that he had died only a few months before.[26]

that the scruple to convict diminishes the certainty of punishment, and therefore raises hopes of impunity, is illustrated by the case of two american brothers who, desirous to perpetrate a murder, waited till their victim had left their state, in which capital punishment had been abolished, and had betaken himself to a state which still retained it, before they ventured to execute their criminal intention. that such reluctance to convict is often most injurious to[42] the public is proved by the case of a woman at chelmsford who some years ago was acquitted, in spite of strong evidence, on a charge of poisoning, and who, before her guilt was finally proved, lived to poison several other persons who would otherwise have escaped her arts.[27]

such considerations as these will, perhaps, lead some day to the abolition of capital punishment. the final test of all punishment is its efficiency, not its humanity. there is often more inhumanity in a long sentence of penal servitude than in a capital sentence, for the majority of murderers deserve as little mercy as they get. the many offences which have ceased to be capital in english law yielded less to a sense of the inhumanity of the punishment as related to the crime than to the experience that such a punishment led to almost total impunity. the bankers, for instance, who petitioned parliament to abolish capital punishment for forgery, did so, as they said, because they found by experience that the infliction of death, or the possibility of its infliction, prevented the prosecution, the conviction, and the punishment of the criminal; therefore they begged for ‘that protection for their property which they would derive from a more lenient law.’

[43]

for the same reason it is of little avail to call in question, as beccaria does, the right of society to inflict death as a punishment. there may be a distinction between the right of society and its might, but it is one of little comfort to the man who incurs its resentment. a man in a dungeon does better to amuse himself with spiders and cobwebs than with reflections on the encroachment of the law upon his liberty, or with theories about the rights of government. whenever society has ceased to exercise any of its powers against individuals, it has not been from the acceptance of any new doctrine as to its rights, but from more enlightened views as to its real interests, and a cultivated dislike of cruelty and oppression.

when beccaria wrote against capital punishment, one great argument against its abolition was its practical universality. it had been abolished in ancient egypt by king sabaco,[28] in the best period of the roman republics by the porcian law, and in the time of the roman empire by calo-johannes.[29] but these cases were too remote from modern times to lend much weight to the general argument. at that time russia alone of all the countries in the world[44] had, from the accession of the empress elizabeth, afforded a practical example of the fact, that the general security of life is not diminished by the withdrawal of the protection of capital punishment. but since that time this truth has become less and less a theory or speculation, and it now rests on the positive experience of no inconsiderable portion of the world. in tuscany, holland, portugal, russia, roumania, saxony, prussia, belgium, and in ten of the united states of america, the death penalty has either been abolished or discontinued; and can it be thought that the people of those countries are so indifferent to the safety of their lives as to be content with a less efficient legal protection than is vouchsafed in countries where the protection is death?

the opponents of capital punishment may fairly, therefore, draw an argument in their favour from the fact that so many parts of the world have found it not incompatible with the general security of life to erase the death penalty from their list of deterrent agencies. it is better to rely on so plain a fact than on statistics which, like two-edged weapons, often cut both ways. the frequency of executions in one country and their total absence in another may severally coexist with great numerical equality in the number of murders committed in each. it is always better, therefore, to look for some other cause for a given number of murders than the kind of punishment directed to their repression. they may[45] depend on a thousand other things, which it is difficult to ascertain or eliminate. thus both in bavaria, where capital punishment has been retained, and in switzerland, where it had been abolished in 1874, murders have increased greatly in recent years; and this fact has, with great probability, been attributed to the influence of bad habits contracted during the franco-german war.

capital punishment being less general in the world now than torture was when beccaria wrote, it seems to be a fair logical inference that it is already far advanced towards its total disappearance. for the same argument which voltaire applied in the case of torture cannot fail sooner or later to be applied to capital punishment. ‘if,’ he says, ‘there were but one nation in the world which had abolished the use of torture; and if in that nation crimes were no more frequent than in others, … its example would be surely sufficient for the rest of the world. england alone might instruct all other nations in this particular; but england is not the only nation. torture has been abolished in other countries, and with success; the question, therefore, is decided.’ if in this argument we read capital punishment instead of torture, murders instead of crimes, and portugal instead of england, we shall best appreciate that which is after all the strongest argument against capital punishment, namely, that it has been proved unnecessary for its professed object in so many countries that it might safely be relinquished in all.