It is to the credit of Sir Henry Smith, whose letter you published on Friday, that he is quick to recognize that this is the only thing that signifies. Nor can it be said that there is any ambiguity whatever in his own views on the subject. Sir Henry is quite clear that all sympathy with murderers, even in exceptional cases where they “suffer terribly,” is thrown away. Generally speaking, they suffer very little--less than many innocent people who die in their beds. Nevertheless the rope remains as the great deterrent. The rope it is that is anticipated with terror. If this is, as I believe it to be, a correct summary of Sir Henry’s views, perhaps you will allow me, as a confirmed disbeliever in the efficacy of capital punishment, to make one or two comments, not the less true because they must often have been made before. People, of course, are at liberty to think and believe that there would be more murders than there are if hanging were abolished; but except from analogy with foreign countries, notably, perhaps, with France, where capital punishment, after being abolished, has recently been restored, there is absolutely no evidence, nor in the nature of things can there be any, to show that the rope is a deterrent. If there are any whom the fear of it has deterred from murder, they are and must remain an unknown quantity. All we know, as distinguished from conjecture, is that crimes for which capital punishment used to be the penalty have sensibly diminished, and that murders continue to afflict society in quite sufficient numbers to unnerve the more timid members of the community--the fear of death notwithstanding. It is a popular fallacy to regard a murderer as the worst of criminals. The real truth is that in many cases it is hardly fair to describe him as a criminal at all. There is nothing inconsistent, human nature being what it is, in a man of blameless antecedents being driven in a moment of frenzy into committing an act of violence from which his whole soul would recoil in his saner moments. No one who has not been through the fire can tell what may be the effect on his self-control of a long course of studied insults and provocation on the part of a worthless wife against her husband persevered in day by day, for months and even years at a stretch. Sir Henry Smith, in his virtuous indignation with Crippen, makes no allowance for desperate circumstances like these. He is angry with Crippen on account of his coolness in the witness-box, which he calls an outrage, and he apparently regards it as a distinct aggravation of his conduct that he should have sworn to love and cherish at the altar the wife whom he subsequently put to death. It is somewhat amazing to me that considerations such as these should weigh for a moment in any just appreciation of Crippen’s character. They seem to me absolutely irrelevant.