DEATH PENALTY for COWARDS

Manawatu Times, Volume LIII, Issue 6691, 18 August 1928, Page 5 (Supplement)

DEATH PENALTY for COWARDS

■HAT is a coward? Where does cowardice begin or end? These questions have recently been debated* in the British House of .Commons in connection with the matter of abolishing the death penalty for cowardice in time of wur. And some of the most interesting thoughts on cowardice that have ever been produced (writes Gregory Clark) were advanced during this debate. Are cowards born or made? Isn’t a man who is cowardly born that way, with all the other miserable ingredients in him,' part of him and his heritage, like the colour of his hair and eyes, his,size, his way of walking, or his ability to sing? And if a man was made that way by God, why. shoot him? Can the death penalty prevent cowards from enlisting? / Lord Hugh Cecil, speaking from the point of view of the,born aristocrat, made the best plea-for the death penalty. “If,” said the noble lord, “you shoot a soldier for cowardice, that makes the whole army think ;• that it is a shocking thing. The penalty -of death has quite the unique quality of setting up a particular offence, and making people think'that that is a thing which no one should do, not mainly from the fear of the. actual penalty, but because it .sets a 'stigma upon the offence which nothing, else can do.” j _ _ Mi*. Duff Cooper, M.P., Financial Secretary to the War Office'; if not an artistocrat himself, at least married to one, supported Lord Hugh Cecil’s view ingeniously;— ; ■ ';■'■* t “During the war,” said he, “at one time It was made a crime for which people could be sent to prison to take matches into a munitions factory. Some careless young employee, some girl perhaps under 20, forgetting the importance of that rule, would take a box of matches into a munitions factory. / / ‘ “No moral turpitude whatever 1 was involved in it, and yet people were sent to prison for doing it, and rightly because It was only by putting upon them some terrible penalty that you could make people realise the seriousness of the act they were carry;, ingout. “In the same way, in time of war. when one man’s action may betray so many others and may lead ,to such great disaster, you attach a penalty to it such as we are asking the committee to pass to-day.” - Whether for these or. other reasons and in spite of very strong objections expressed against the death penalty for cowardice and -desertion —which is merely the effect of cowardice—the old-fashioned and time-honoured institution of death fdr tile coward whs preserved in the British Army. Australia went on record,, at the outset of the last war, against the death penalty, and sent her contingent to the war on the understanding that the death penalty would'not be inflicted —at least without reference to the Government of Australia; '’ l But since the war nine other army crimes' that were during the jvai punishable with death before ,di firing squad—looting, striking a sentry,' sleeping on sentry post and so forth —have been deleted from the army regulations. Only two—cowardice and desertion, are left of the laws that have prevailed in the arniies bf the world since, you mlglit . sny;: Caesar’s time.