6. The abiding necessity of this _right of the sword_ is argued from the strength and frequency of the provocations to deeds of bloodshed and violence that must ever be encountered in human society. What these provocations are, how many and how strong, may be left to the reflection of the student who reads his newspaper, or even his novel. Not the least appalling thing about crime, atrocious crime especially, is the example that it gives and the imitators whom it begets. It is not merely that it sets the perpetrator himself on the downward path, so that, unless detected and punished, a man's first deed of blood is rarely his last: it draws others after him by a fatal fascination. Like the images which the Epicureans supposed all visible objects to slough off and shed into the air around them, such phantoms and images of guilt float about a great crime, enter into the mind of the spectator and of the hearer, and there, upon slight occasion, turn to actual repetitions of the original deed. The one preventive is to append to that deed a punishment, the image of which shall also enter into the mind, excite horror, and disenchant the recipient. This is not to be done by mere banishment of the criminal, nor by his perpetual incarceration. Exile and prison--particularly in view of the humanity of a modern penitentiary--do not sufficiently strike the imagination. One sweet hour of revenge will often appear cheap at the price of ten years' penal servitude. There is nothing goes to the heart like death. Death is the most striking of terrors; it is also the penalty that most exactly counterpoises in the scales of justice the commission of a murderous crime. All States need this dread figure of the Sword-bearer standing at the elbow of the Sovereign. 7. But is not every capital sentence a trespass upon the dominion of God, Lord of life and death? No, for that same God it is who has endowed man with a nature that needs to grow up in civil society, which civil society again needs for its maintenance the power to make laws, to sit in judgment on transgressors, and in extreme cases, as we have proved, having tried them and found them guilty, to take away even their lives, to the common terror and horror of the crime. God, who wills human nature to be, wills it to be on the terms on which alone it can be. To that end He has handed over to the civil ruler so much of His own divine power of judgment, as shall enable His human delegate to govern with assurance and effect. That means the right of the sword. 8. It may be objected that to kill any man is to treat him as a _thing_, not a person, as an _heterocentric_, not an _autocentric_ being, which is a proceeding essentially unnatural and wrong, (c. ii., s. i., n. 2, p. 203.) St. Thomas's answer here is peculiarly valuable: