THE LORDS AND HANGING
SIR,—In the midst of the troubles and anxieties of the world today the abolition of the death penalty had come as a gleam of hope that a few sparks of sanity were still preserved among the rulers of mankind. Now the House of Lords, in a debate which positively reeks with smug hypocrisy and self-righteousness, threatens to extinguish even these few sparks. Few of their Lordships would fail to agree that the supreme political issue of our time is the survival of democracy. But the basis on which democracy is founded is the sacredness of each individual— that man, in the singular, is an end in himself. Once admit with Lord Goddard that some individuals are fit may to be destroyed, and you have admitted the thin end of the wedge of mass destruction of the mentally defective, extermination of supposedly inferior races, etc.
The chief absurdity of the debate, however, was reached when the Bishops of Winchester and Truro exposed themselves as being in apostolic succession to those nineteenth-century clerics who consistently opposed the abolition of hanging, even for such minor offences as petty theft. We are assured by the first of these ecclesiastical authorities that hanging is not inconsistent with Christianity. Small wonder, then, that the second desires to increase the number of offences to which this Christian penalty is applicable. It would be interesting to read the revised edition of the Sermon on the Mount on which this new theology is based. Is this sort of debate really the best defence which the House of Lords can muster in its claim to retain its present powers ?—Yours faithfully,
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