Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 September 1875 — Legal Punishments. [ARTICLE]

Legal Punishments.

It will doubtless always be maintained, and with a good deal of reason, that legal punishments should be enforced without distinction of persons. There must be, it is claimed, the same law for the rich and the poor. This is fundamentally very true, and the truth of the maxim is so generally accepted that in every civilized country capital crimes are equably punished. Whenever there are any distinctions at all, they pertain,to minor offenses. Rich peculators sometimes succeed in escaping the penalty of their misdeeds, not because the law makes a distinction between the rich and the poor thief, but because the peculation has not been the theft direct, has been adroitly managed so as to stand beyond the reach of the law. In all cases of a graver character where the offenses committed are identically of a like nature the penalty is the same, no matter who the person is. But there are a few cases that necessarily involve a question of condition or of antecedents. The rich and the poor forgers suffer alike; but perhaps the rich and the poor drunkards, or the rich and the floor combatants in an assault, are quite likely to have a different sort of penalty dealt out to ■them. But this different justice in appearance may be very far from being different in fact. The noisy vagabond whois sent to tlie penitentiary for ten days probably feels no disgrace, and experiences only a little temporary inconvenience in the penalty; but to the man of customaiy sobriety, who in an exceptional convivial hour disturbs the peace, a single night in the station-house is an intense humiliation, a bitter fact likely to stain and embarrass all his future life. To a man of sensibility and refinement a prison is ten times more formidable than to a man of course instincts and rude habits of life. Everything in this world is much or little by contrast ; a mode of life that to a laborer is comfortable and even agreeable to one of another kind of training would be unendurable;.,the tasks that some find easy others find intolerable; the act that with one man is a matter of custom to another is a bitter humiliation; and hence if the law in the infliction of its penalties makes no distinctions it simply succeeds in making practically tremendous differences. If it be a fundamental maxim that all men should suffer alike for similar offenses, then, in order that they may suffer alike the penalty should be adjusted to the character, rank, and conditions pertaining to the persons under judgment. An inflexible law is sure to be an unjust law. A law incompetent to. recognize the difference between a woman reared tenderly, amid ease and luxury, and a fierce termagant of the gutter, or insensible to the difference between a man of breeding and life-long repute and one hardened to every form of degradation, such a law is actually very unjust, however much it may cany upon the surface a seeming equity. How far it may be practicable to act upon these differences of character and condition, it is not easy to say. In many kinds of offenses it isn certain that it cannot be done; but, as the law’ always falls even at its best with peculiar harshness upon that better class who are not habitual criminals, who have under some mad temptation sacrifled every thing that had made life dear, there need be no fear that these unfortunates will not experience the bitter consequences of their misdoing to the full.— Appletons' Journal. &