The Bill which the Duma passed last week abolishing capital punishment was discussed in the Upper House the day before yesterday and referred to a Committee. As the treatment of this matter has excited no little bewilderment abroad, it will, perhaps, not be useless to go further into the history of capital punishment in Russia, which I have mentioned in a previous letter. Capital punishment was abolished in Russia by the Empress Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great, in 1753. But as long as the knout was in use it was rather the name of the thing than the thing itself which was abolished, because a hundred lashes of the knout meant death. During the last years in which the knout was employed the number of lashes was limited to thirty-five. Its use was abolished by the Emperor Nicholas in the first year of his reign (1825). Beating with a birch was abolished by the Emperor Alexander II. in 1863, except for peasants; the beating of peasants was abolished in 1904. “Depuis lors,” writes M. Leroy-Beaulieu in his standard book on Russia, “la législation Russe est probablement la plus douce de l’Europe.... La peine capitale a depuis lors été réellement supprimée; à l’inverse de ce qui se voit en beaucoup d’autres pays, elle n’existe plus que pour les crimes politiques, pour les attentats contre la vie du Souverain ou la sûreté de l’État.” During almost the whole reign of Alexander II, from 1855 to 1876, only one man was executed on the scaffold, namely Karakosof, the perpetrator of the first attempt made on the Emperor’s life. From 1866 to 1903 only 114 men suffered the penalty of death throughout the whole of the Russian Empire. Commenting on these statistics in the Council of Empire, M. Tagantzef pointed out that, in contradistinction to this, during 1906 up to the month of June, that is, during five months, 108 people have been condemned to death under martial law, and ninety have been executed, not counting people who have been killed without a trial. The cause, therefore, of the present agitation is the fact that capital punishment exists in Russia for political crimes only by virtue of martial law. M. Leroy-Beaulieu, in commenting on the first instances of this turn of affairs, which occurred in 1878, when a political agitator was executed in Odessa, remarks that a modern State which abolishes capital punishment should abolish it altogether, “pour ne point se donner le démenti d’une contradiction rendue parfois d’autant plus choquante pour la conscience publique qu’il lui répugne de voir, comme en Russie, le régicide ou le simple conspirateur politique traité plus sévèrement que le parricide.”