in their eyes something of the charm and glamor of an
ideal existence, like that in the Happy Valley from which Rasselas had
the folly to escape. Whatever advantages to the public may be secured by
abating the rigors of imprisonment and inconveniences incident to
execution, there is this objection: it makes them less deterrent. Let
the penologers and philanthropers have their way and even hanging might
be made so pleasant and withal so interesting a social distinction that
it would deter nobody but the person hanged. Adopt the euthanasian
method of electricity, asphyxia by smothering in rose-leaves, or slow
poisoning with rich food, and the death penalty may come to be regarded
as the object of a noble ambition to the _bon vivant_, and the rising
young suicide may go and kill somebody else instead of himself, in order
to receive from the public executioner a happier dispatch than his own
'prentice hand can assure him.

But the advocates of agreeable pains and penalties tell us that in the
darker ages, when cruel and degrading punishment was the rule, and was
freely inflicted for every light infraction of the law, crime was more
common than it is now; and in this they appear to be right. But one and
all, they overlook a fact equally obvious and vastly significant, that
the intellectual, moral and social condition of the masses was very low.
Crime was more common because ignorance was more common, poverty was
more common, sins of authority, and therefore hatred of authority, were
more common. The world of even a century ago was a different world from
the world of today, and a vastly more uncomfortable one. The popular
adage to the contrary notwithstanding, human nature was not by a long
cut the same then that it is now. In the very ancient time of that early
English king, George III, when women were burned at the stake in public
for various offenses and men were hanged for "coining" and children for
theft, and in the still remoter period (_circa_ 1530), when prisoners
were boiled in several waters, divers sorts of criminals were
disemboweled and some are thought to have undergone the _peine forte et
dure_ of cold-pressing (an infliction which the pen of Hugo has since
made popular--in literature)--in these wicked old days crime flourished,
not because of the law's severity, but in spite of it. It is possible
that our law-making ancestors understood the situation as it then was a
trifle better than we can understand it on