CAPITAL PUNISHMENT CONDEMNED.

Wanganui Chronicle, Issue 20039, 24 March 1914, Page 7

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT CONDEMNED.

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —I write in answer to a correspondent in your journal who, to me seems to lifelong to an age that has long gone by, for lie wants to increase in place of doin(g away with capital punishment. if our correspondent deals at length with assaults on little girls, and sexual offences, and he thinks that by dealing barbarously with the said offenders that that will stop men from becoming sexual maniacs and men will become more intellectual and more self-re-specting. It is an exploded theory that you can make men righteous by force, and it is not generally admitted, but it is true for all that, that to punish a man for being bad is as wicked and as barbarous as it would be to punish a man for being good. Neither can help beinjg one or the other, and neither should be claimed or praised. For a man to be a Christian, he has to be of a Christian turn of mind before he can be converted to Christianity, and for a man to be a sexual freak he has to have a leaning in that direction before he can become same. Of course there are men who call themselves Christians and -there are men who are really so. Hanging is a distinct relict of the past, and for a person to advocate it sounds very cut of date, and infers that the writer is not much of a student of philosophy. A person who is hanged only endures the dread of same for a few weeks before he is hanged, but his relatives suffer the loss for years afterwards, to say nothing of the people who are nervously unstrung and who are upset over these matters. Some people even go out of their minds through pondering over the fact of a man getting hung. If we cannot punish a man without punishing innocent being, we should let him go free. I do not advocate that such people should be allowed to go scot free; but I say that they should be kept ia a separate institution and an effort made to reform them. I do nefc even stop there; but I say that society should be altered so as not to make and produce men akin to sexual beasts. Present society is enough to turn a God into a barbarian, let alone a man. I do not want to suppress crime, but I aim at doing away with crime so that we will not have It to suppress. 1 conclude