niversal
morality the altar-fires of honor and the beacons of conscience could
not be kept alight A community without crime would be a community
without warm and elevated sentiments--without the sense of justice,
without generosity, without courage, without magnanimity--a community of
small, smug souls, uninteresting to God and uncoveted by the Devil. We
can have too much of crime, no doubt; what the wholesome proportion is
none can say. 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 virtual immunity from any penalty at
all, is justly entitled to the innocent satisfaction that comes of being
a simpleton.

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 activity. 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 quality of toughness notably
augmented by the Christian spirit of the regime.

II.

As to painless executions, the simple and practical way to make them
both just and popular is the adoption by murderers of a system of
painless assassinations. Until this is done there seems to be no hope
that the people will renounce the wholesome discomfort of the style
of executions endeared to them by memories and associations of the
tenderest character. There is also, I fancy, a shaping notion in the
public mind that the penologists and their allies have gone about as
far as they can safely be permitted to go in the direction of