Speech In Favor of Capital Punishment
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~3,790 words · 18 passages
Cite this work
- APAJohn Stuart Mill. (n.d.). Speech In Favor of Capital Punishment. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-stuart-mill/speech-in-favor-of-capital-punishment
- MLAJohn Stuart Mill. "Speech In Favor of Capital Punishment." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-stuart-mill/speech-in-favor-of-capital-punishment.
- ChicagoJohn Stuart Mill. Speech In Favor of Capital Punishment. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-stuart-mill/speech-in-favor-of-capital-punishment.
What it is about
The 1868 speech in Parliament for retaining capital punishment for murder.
Context and history
Eighteen fragments, and the Mill text that most surprises anyone who knows him from On Liberty. The argument is that life imprisonment is **more cruel** than a quick death, and that abolition would degrade the value society places on life. It reads better knowing he lost the vote.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
It would be a great satisfaction to me if I were able to support this Motion. It is always a matter of regret to me to find myself, on a public question, opposed to those who are called—sometimes in the way of honour, and sometimes in what is intended for ridicule—the philanthropists. Of all persons who take part in public affairs, they are those for whom, on the whole, I feel the greatest amount of respect; for their characteristic is, that they devote their time, their labour, and much of their money to objects purely public, with a less admixture of either personal or class selfishness, than any other class of politicians whatever. On almost all the great questions, scarcely any politicians are so steadily and almost uniformly to be found on the side of right; and they seldom err, but by an exaggerated application of some just and highly important principle. On the very subject that is now occupying us we all know what signal service they have rendered. It is through their efforts that our criminal laws—which within my memory hanged people for stealing in a dwelling house to the value of 40s.-laws by virtue of which rows of human beings might be seen suspended in front of Newgate by those who ascended or descended Ludgate Hill—have so greatly relaxed their most revolting and most impolitic ferocity, that aggravated murder is now practically the only crime which is punished with death by any of our lawful tribunals; and we are even now deliberating whether the extreme penalty should be retained in that solitary case. This vast gain, not only to humanity, but to the ends of penal justice, we owe to the philanthropists; and if they are mistaken, as I cannot but think they are, in the present instance, it is only in not perceiving the right time and place for stopping in a career hitherto so eminently beneficial. Sir, there is a point at which, I conceive, that career ought to stop.
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