ot a hare,
committed forgery or larceny, was a recusant catholic or a wizard,
there was, on his conviction, but one penalty meted out--death. To
Shelley's sensitive nature, this painted and tinged everything around
him with an aspect of blood. In one of his political pamphlets,
summoning all his energies, he depicts in fearful colors, the depraved
example of an execution--how it brutalized the race, and how it was
the duty of man not to commit murder on his fellow-man, in the name of
the laws. The abolition of the first of these, he stated that
reformers should propose on the eve of a great political change. He
considered that the punishment by death harbored revenge and
retaliation, which legislation should be the means of eradicating, and
he urged that

"Governments which derive their institutions from the
existence of circumstances of barbarism and violence, with
some rare exceptions, perhaps, are bloody in proportion as
they are despotic, and form the manners of their subjects to
a sympathy with their own spirit."

In England, as in many other countries, capital punishment is now only
employed on conviction of murder or high treason. In Spain and Italy
it was totally abolished, on the foundation of their young republics.
Thus have the labors of Shelley, and other reformers for the good of
humanity, aided to extinguish crime made law.

Cruelty to animals was another reform agitated by Shelley. His love
for the animal kingdom and hatred of blood-shedding, was so great,
that he personally carried the passion to such an extent as to become
a vegetarian, and endeavored to induce others to be the same, in an
admirable argument of some length in the notes to "Queen Mab."

The subject of the Rights of Women is approached and expatiated on,
perhaps learnedly, by individuals utterly incompetent to deal with the
question. Such persons, frequently armed with Sunday-school
platitudes, believing in the inferiority of women, consequent on the
supposed fall, and doubtless with heads paved with good intentions, as
a certain place is said to be, do more harm than good to the cause.
This is not wanted, and is worse than useless. To found a real
republic on a solid basis, it can be legislated for only by removing
the ancient landmarks by a gradual process, and coming face to face
with a new order of things, without bias or prejudice borrowed from
the past. Thus that noble woman, Mary Wolstonecraft, as well