Chapter I

For thousands of years—doubtless for hundreds of thousands—an incessant civil war has been going on in every country that has even a rudimentary civilization, and the prospect of peace is no brighter to-day than it was at the beginning of hostilities. This war, with its dreadful mortality and suffering, loses none of its violence in times of peace; indeed, a condition of national tranquillity appears to be most favorable to its relentless prosecution: when the people are not fighting foreigners they have more time for fighting one another. This never-ending internal strife is between the law-breaking and the law-abiding classes. The latter is the larger force—at least it is the stronger and is constantly victorious, yet never takes the full benefit of its victory. The commander of an army who should so neglect his opportunities would be recalled in disgrace, for it is a rule of warfare to take the utmost possible advantage of success.

There should be no such person as an habitual criminal, and there would be none if criminals were not permitted to breed. There are several ways to prevent them—some, like perpetual imprisonment, too expensive; others impossible of discussion here. The best practical and discussible way is to kill them. And in this is no injustice. The man who will not live at peace with his countrymen has no inherent right to live at all. The community against which he wages private war has as clear a right to deprive him of his life as of his liberty by imprisonment, or his property by fines.

We grade crimes and punishments only for expediency, not because there are degrees of guilt, for it is as easy to obey the law against theft as the law against murder, and the true criminality of an offense against the state lies in its infraction of the law, not in the damage to its victim. The venerable dictum that, whereas

It is a sin to steal a pin,
It is a greater to steal a potater,

is brilliant, but erroneous. Logically there are no degrees of crime; a misdemeanor is as hardy a defiance of the community as a felony. The distinction is an administrative fiction to facilitate punishment. It is thought that rather than condemn a misdemeanant to perpetual restraint in prison or death on the gallows jurors would acquit him; and indubitably they would. The purpose of these feeble remarks is to lead public opinion upward through flowery paths of reason to a higher philosophy and a broader conception of duty.

My notion is that a great saving of life and property could be effected by extermination of habitual criminals. Some crime would remain. Under the stress of want, men would occasionally take the property of others; crazed by sudden rage, they would sometimes slay; and so forth. But crimes of premeditation would disappear and the enormously expensive machinery of justice could be abolished. One small prison might suffice for an entire nation. A few courts of criminal jurisdiction, an insignificant constabulary, would preserve the peace and punishment could be made truly reformatory—it would not need to be deterrent. In short, the dream of the reformer, with his everlastingly futile methods of deterrence by mental and moral education, could be made to come to pass in a generation or two by the forthright and merciful plan of effacing the criminal class.

Of course I do not mean to advocate the death penalty for every premeditated infraction of the law, nor do I know how many convictions should be considered as proving the offender an habitual criminal; but certainly I think that, having exceeded the number allowed him, his right to life should be held to have lapsed and he should be removed from this vale of tears forthwith. The fact that a man who habitually breaks the law may be better than another who habitually obeys it, or the fact that he who is convicted may be less guilty than he who escapes conviction, has nothing to do with the matter. If we can not remove all the irreclaimable the greater is the expediency of removing all that we can catch and convict. The law’s inadequacy and inconsistency are patent, but they constitute the silliest plea for “mercy” that stupidity has ever invented.