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WHY MEN ARE HANGED
social system that breeds hypocrisy in the name of morality. But the moral society would not guarantee her the barest subsistence, unless she was ready to pay for that privilege. If she sold herself, she could even have a life of luxury as long as she would have her youth to sell. In orthodox Hindu society, the woman can live only by selling herself either in wedlock or in the open market. Is it moral to drive a girl to prostitution, the only alternative to suicide open to her under the given conditions, simply because she failed to obey social laws that violate the law of nature?
The young man passionately believed that it was not. The murder of the girl was a desperate protest against the tyranny of a callous society. That was the crime for which he was hanged.
B
The next case can be regarded as the sequelnot directly, but taxonomically. If the murder was not committed as it was done in the case just described, it would most probably be committed in a different form, at a latter stage of the social tragedy. If the denouement is postponed, it takes place later; the tragedy ends with a scene in which the major role is differently played by a different
person.
This is the case of a young widow, convicted, not indeed to death, but to a long term of imprisonment, for having strangled her child at birth.
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