Anticipating, therefore, that many existing forms of restraint will have become obsolete because unnecessary, we may very fairly ask ourselves whether, in an improved moral and intellectual atmosphere, it will not have been found advisable to abolish other restraints and requisitions as a directly remedial measure. The suggestion may, at the moment, appear chimerical, but so must every intelligent anticipation of a coming time appear to anyone who approaches the subject without allowing for the difference of conditions, and conceives of changes which will take place so gradually as to be almost unperceived, as if they were to occur per saltum, without any process of slow moral preparation. So would nearly every social condition of the present age have appeared individually to a citizen of the world of 1800, if, possessing intelligence to foresee it, he lacked the imagination necessary to foresee the accompanying and subservient conditions. That public opinion should be so shocked by the execution of capital punishment, that only the most atrocious murders are thus punished--the sentence, where there is any real extenuation at all, being habitually commuted nowadays--is a condition which would hardly have suggested itself even to the most alert imaginations in an age where small thefts were constantly punished by death. Our sense of what may be called the accidental influences of punitive measures is even yet so little developed that only a small minority of the public at the present day is able to perceive that the deterrent effect of flogging, as a punishment for violent robbery, is dearly purchased at the expense of the brutalising relish with which sentences of flogging are welcomed by the public, and even on the judicial bench, where expressions of regret that the same penalty cannot be inflicted for other crimes are still common. Yet it would seem obvious enough that the sanction given to acts of violence by the deliberate adoption of hanging and flogging by the law, which is supposed to be the exemplar of public morality, must tend nearly as much to perpetuate crimes of violence as fear of these chastisements to deter. In attempting to foresee the spirit of legislation in the future it is absolutely necessary to foresee concurrently the spirit of the communities by which the legislation will be adopted. Anticipating, as we cannot fail to anticipate, a sedulous care for moral effects in education, we must anticipate an equal care in legislation. It would be unworthy of the supremely logical age which assuredly is coming, to use all possible measures in the schoolroom to foster in childhood self-reliance and intelligent self-protection, while continuing by "grandmotherly" government of the people to remove as often as possible any need for self-reliance in the adult. The advantages attending little bits of protective law-making often blind us to their ill-effects. It is no