Access Genealogy Library: Some Data, Letters, and Memoranda Collected by FRANKLIN D. LOVE, Relating to the LOVE FAMILY, by Dennis N. Partridge, Volume I, first series.

Table of Contents

Back to Title Page

Back to AG's Free Genealogy Library

Please support our sponsors, they're what makes these pages possible

no ordinary character why I feel more reluctant to embark upon the wide ocean of discussion that this subject naturally conducts one to, than, perhaps, I would otherwise feel. Yes, gentlemen, in legal lore and medical science generally, perhaps, equaled by few and surpassed by none in the country, I say, when I turn my eyes to the other side of the house and then behold the mighty array of gigantic advocates of the negative of the question, and in view of this host of Spartan soldiers in readiness for the oust, thirsting for the life blood of their fellow beings, could I feel anything else than diffident on this occasion? However, like the immortal Leonidas and his compeers his little band interested in a noble cause, the cause of humanity, their common country's cause; situated as they were in the straits of Thermopilae, from fifty to one hundred in number, precious few, I have no doubt Leonidas felt, when he looked at his little band and then at, comparatively speaking, the assembled world as their enemies, on both sea and land, thought he to himself, "it is useless, Ah! farcical, to attempt an engagement with this might host of warriors by profession. Xerxes with three million of warriors, Leonidas, and a hand full, one hundred in number, why sirs, it was a pigmy contending with a giant' feeble man, if I should use the expression, contending with a God. But sires, a different feeling seized the patriot's heart, from numbers, from éclat and evanescent glory before him to the principle and his country's cause. Liberty or despotism was the issue, the bone of contention. After this process of reasoning with in his own mind, he locks with a firm steadiness on his own native land, his own native island; then he saw and heard the cries for protection from his noble band of compeers' progeny, and then he saw vulnerable maidens and matrons with a number of hoary headed sages, decrepid and worn down with the cares of State, and he saw the liberty of his own native land was about to be swallowed up in the whirlpool of tyranny, and trodden under the iron heels of Persian despotism. His arm was strengthened, his heart and soul widened and expanded by the flame of patriotism, that burned within. A confidence in the God of his faith there around him that impregnable panoply which never permitted the inglorious victory of three millions in combat against one hundred, the immortal few, and although the body fail and the little band be numbered with the illustrious dead, yet the hallucination, the slavish and servile victory ne'er once was heard by the proud monarch as he sat on this throne imperial, and seemed to look upon and over the wide world with a vain pride as his theatrical stage, on which he ad daily passing before him the bloody tragedy of death and carnage, and in the ecstasy of his self-created-greatness, the blue vault of heaven bedecked with burning worlds, appeared nothing more to him than guns and diadems, ornamenting and embellishing his imaginary palace. Thus, like Leonidas, though at first we may feel intimidated at the vast odds against which we have to contend, yet when we turn from anguish and fearful array of talents, and seize hold of our principles and cause, then sirs, like the immortal Leonidas, the Grecian patriot, in firmness and resolve, we will throw ourselves in the passway and die in the struggle, humanity's cause, the only candid principle for a truly republican government.
        Now gentlemen, to the question, the evidence applicable thereto, Should capital punishment be abolished or not? I say it most assuredly should. The whys and wherefores, the reasons and the proofs are as multiplied and various as, comparatively speaking, the sands of the sea. My first position in support of the affirmative is, that the benefit derived from society from human punishment consists not in the enormity thereof, but in the certainty of the punishment to the perpetrator of the illegal act, o

Back | Next | Title | Purchase Book