ble that a
people that once put its female assassins to death would ever have
relinquished the obvious advantages of the practice while retaining with
purposeless tenacity some of its costly preliminary forms. Whatever may
have been the reason, the custom was observed with all the gravity of a
serious intention. Gunkux professes knowledge of one or two instances (he
does not name his authorities) where matters went so far as conviction and
sentence, and adds that the mischievous sentimentalists who had always
lent themselves to the solemn jest by protestations of great
_vraisemblance_ against "the judicial killing of women," became really
alarmed and filled the land with their lamentations. Among the phenomena
of brazen effrontery he classes the fact that some of these loud
protagonists of the right of women to assassinate unpunished were
themselves women! Howbeit, the sentences, if ever pronounced, were never
executed, and during the first quarter of the twentieth century the
meaningless custom of bringing female assassins to trial was abandoned.
What the effect was of their exemption from this considerable
inconvenience we have not the data to conjecture, unless we understand as
an allusion to it some otherwise obscure words of the famous Edward Bok,
the only writer of the period whose work has survived. In his monumental
essay on barbarous penology, entitled "Slapping the Wrist," he couples
"woman's emancipation from the trammels of law" and "man's better prospect
of death" in a way that some have construed as meaning that he regarded
them as cause and effect. It must be said, however, that this
interpretation finds no support in the general character of his writing,
which is exceedingly humane, refined and womanly.

It has been said that the writings of this great man are the only
surviving work of his period, but of that we are not altogether sure.
There exists a fragment of an anonymous essay on woman's legal
responsibility which many Americologists think belongs to the beginning of
the twentieth century. Certainly it could not have been written later than
the middle of it, for at that time woman had been definitely released from
any responsibility to any law but that of her own will. The essay is an
argument against even such imperfect exemption as she had in its author's
time.

"It has been urged," the writer says, "that women, being less rational and
more emotional than men, should not be held accountable in t