s continuance, and therefore the degree of its severity, are
indeterminate; they are dependent on no limiting statute, and on
neither the will of the power inflicting nor the conduct of the person
suffering.

To sentence a person to a punishment that is to be mild or severe
according to chance or--which is even worse--circumstance, which but one
person, and that person not officially connected with administration of
justice, can but partly control, is a monstrous perversion of the main
principles that are supposed to underlie the laws.

In "the case at bar" it can be nothing to the woman--possibly herself
remarried--whether the man remarries or not; that is, can affect only
her feelings, and only such of them as are least creditable to her.
Yet her self-interest is enlisted against him to do him incessant
disservice. By merely caring for her health she increases the sharpness
of his punishment--for punishment it is if he feels it such; every hour
that she wrests from death is added to his "term." The expediency of
preventing a man from marrying, without having the power to prevent him
from making his marriage desirable in the interest of the public and
vital to that of some woman, is not discussable here. If a man is ever
justified in poisoning a woman who is no longer his wife it is when, by
way of making him miserable, the State has given him, or he supposes it
to have given him, a direct and distinct interest in her death.

III.

With a view, possibly, to promoting respect for law by making the
statutes so conform to public sentiment that none will fall into
disesteem and disuse, it has been advocated that there be a formal
recognition of sex in the penal code, by making a difference in the
punishment of men and of women for the same crimes and misdemeanors. The
argument is that if women were "provided" with milder punishment
juries would sometimes convict them, whereas they now commonly get off
altogether.

The plan is not so new as might be thought. Many of the nations of
antiquity of whose laws we have knowledge, and nearly all the European
nations until within a comparatively recent time, punished women
differently from men for the same offenses. And as recently as the
period of the Early Puritan in New England women were punished for some
offenses which men might commit without fear if not without reproach.
The ducking-stool, for example, was an appliance for softening the
female temper only. In Engl