These were serious applications of the death penalty, to which we
certainly owe in some degree the purification of society by the
elimination of individuals who would otherwise have swelled their
criminal posterity.
In conclusion, if we wish to treat the death penalty seriously,
and derive from it the only service of which it is capable, we
must apply it on this enormous scale; or else, if it is retained
as an ineffectual terror, we should be acting more seriously if we
were to expunge it from the penal code, after excluding it from
our ordinary practice. And as I shall certainly not have the
courage to ask for the restoration of these mediaeval modes of
extermination, I am still, for the practical considerations above
mentioned, a convinced abolitionist, especially for such countries
as Italy, where a more or less artificial and superficial current
of public opinion is keenly opposed to capital punishment.
Setting aside the death penalty, as unnecessary in normal
times, and inapplicable in the only proportions which would make
it efficacious, for the born criminals who commit the most serious
crimes, there remains only a choice between these two modes of
elimination--transportation for life and indefinite seclusion.
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