Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/294

To suppress the extreme penalty for crimes which endanger the security of the state, that is to say, the security of all, and to enforce it for crimes committed against simple individuals, appears to me to be a monstrous inconsistency, which must sooner or later produce the logical and inevitable consequences which always attend human events. On the other hand, to abolish in either case, as excessive, the death penalty for capital crimes, would be equivalent in its results to the abolition of every kind of penalty for lesser offenses; for if you once admit any other than the death penalty for capital crimes, you would violate the laws of a just proportion, and then whatever punishment may be applied to the lesser class of offenses must in equity be considered as oppressive and unjust.

If the abolition of the death penalty for political offenses is founded on the negation of political crimes, and if this negation is justified by the fallibility of the state in these matters, it is clear that every system of penalty should be suppressed; because fallibility in the political order supposes fallibility in the moral order, and this double fallibility supposes the radical incompetency of the state to designate any human action as a crime. Now, if this fallibility is a fact, all governments are incompetent to punish, because they are all fallible.

He alone can find another guilty of crime who may accuse him of sin; and he alone can inflict punishment for the one who may impose it for the other. Governments have only power to impose a penalty upon man in their quality of being so delegated by God, and the human law is only competent when it is the application of the divine law. When governments reject God and