ESSAYS, &c. I. SACREDNESS OF HUMAN LIFE. Suicide-Expediency. 'The power over human life is the sole prerogative of Him who gave it. Human laws, therefore, are in rebellion against this prerogative when they transfer it to human hands.' DR. RUSH. OUR first inquiry will be respecting the authority for Capital Punishment. We do not intend to take an extensive view of this part of our subject, for there are many other considerations which would be more interesting to the general reader. The reader should remember that the great object of our labor will be to show the injustice of Capital Punishments. The disposal of a prisoner is a matter for a work on another plan. Take away first this cruel, sanguinary law, and then let benevolence and justice do their work. We wish to establish, clearly, that life is sacred, inalienable, a gift from Heaven. And even our Declaration of Rights admits this great truth. Settle this great question forever, and then society will begin to improve; humanity will be respected, and the criminal will be looked on with pity as a man and a brother. It has been said, that society is a compact, and that each individual must give up some portion of his rights to the government under which he lives. Mr. Rantoul contends, however, that there is no such compact. 'It belongs to those,' he says, 'who claim for society the rightful power of life and death over its members, as a consequence of the social compact, to show in that compact the express provisions which convey that power. But it cannot be pretended that there are, or ever were, such provisions. It is argued, as boldly as strangely, that this right is to be implied from the nature of the compact. It may seem unnecessary to reply to such an assumption; but it has often been advanced, and for that reason deserves our notice. In point of fact, there is no social compact actually entered into by the members of society. It is a convenient fiction—a mere creature of the imagination-a form of expression often used to avoid long and difficult explanations of the real nature of the relation between the body politic and its individual members. This relation is not, strictly speaking, that of a compact. It is not by our voluntary consent that we become, each one of us, parties to it. The mere accident of birth first introduced us, and made us subject to its arrangements, before we were, in any sense, free agents. After we had grown to the age of freemen, and had a right to a voice in the common concerns, what alternatives had we then left? Simply these. Resistance to the social compact, as it is called, under the prospect of producing ruin, confusion, anarchy, slaughter almost without bounds, and finally ending in a new form of the social compact, much more objectionable than that which had been destroyed, if the resistance should prove successful: should it fail of success, incurring the penalty of treason, a cruel death, to such as have not been fortunate |