thout courage, without mercy, without magnanimity--a community of
small, smug souls, uninteresting to God and uncoveted by the Devil. We
can have, and do have, too much crime, no doubt; what the wholesome
proportion is none can tell. Just now we are running a good deal to
murder, but he who can gravely attribute that phenomenon, or any part of
it, to infliction of the death penalty, instead of to virtual immunity
from any penalty at all, is justly entitled to the innocent satisfaction
that comes of being a simpleton.

III

The New Woman is against the death penalty, naturally, for she is hot
and hardy in the conviction that whatever is is wrong. She has visited
this world in order to straighten things about a bit, and is in distress
lest the number of things be insufficient to her need. The matter is
important variously; not least so in its relation to the new heaven and
the new earth that are to be the outcome of woman suffrage. There can be
no doubt that the vast majority of women have sentimental objections to
the death penalty that quite outweigh such practical considerations in
its favor as they can be persuaded to comprehend. Aided by the minority
of men afflicted by the same mental malady, they will indubitably effect
its abolition in the first lustrum of their political "equality." The
New Woman will scarcely feel the seat of power warm beneath her before
giving to the assassin's "unhand me, villain!" the authority of law. So
we shall make again the old experiment, discredited by a thousand
failures, of preventing crime by tenderness to caught criminals. And the
criminal uncaught will treat us to a quantity and quality of crime
notably augmented by the Christian spirit of the new _regime_.

IV

As to painless execution, the simple and practical way to make them both
just and expedient is the adoption by murderers of a system of painless
assassinations. Until this is done there seems to be no call to
renounce the wholesome discomfort of the style of executions endeared to
us by memories and associations of the tenderest character. There is, I
fancy, a shaping notion in the observant mind that the penologists and
their allies have gone about as far as they can safely be permitted to
go in the direction of a softer suasion of the criminal nature toward
good behavior. The modern prison has become a rather more comfortable
habitation than the dangerous classes are accustomed to at home. Modern
prison life has