If men ever become so
ideally virtuous, the right of the State to visit gross crime with
death cannot hurt them, and it will strengthen their virtue, as all
human social virtue will ever need strengthening.
6. The abiding necessity of this _right of the sword_ is argued from
the strength and frequency of the provocations to deeds of bloodshed
and violence that must ever be encountered in human society. What
these provocations are, how many and how strong, may be left to the
reflection of the student who reads his newspaper, or even his novel.
Not the least appalling thing about crime, atrocious crime especially,
is the example that it gives and the imitators whom it begets. It is
not merely that it sets the perpetrator himself on the downward path,
so that, unless detected and punished, a man's first deed of blood is
rarely his last: it draws others after him by a fatal fascination.
Like the images which the Epicureans supposed all visible objects to
slough off and shed into the air around them, such phantoms and images
of guilt float about a great crime, enter into the mind of the
spectator and of the hearer, and there, upon slight occasion, turn to
actual repetitions of the original deed.
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