a softer
suasion of the criminal nature toward good behavior. The modern prison
has become a rather more comfortable habitation than the dangerous
classes are accustomed to at home. Modern prison life has 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
philanthrope, 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 murder somebody else instead of himself in order to
receive 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 they one
and all 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 quite 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
poisoners were boiled in several waters, divers sorts of criminals were
disemboweled and some are thought to have undergone _the pene forte et
dure_ of cold-pressing (an infliction which the pen of Hugo has since
made popular--in literature)--in these wicked old days it is possible
that cri