The French guillotine is a cumbersome contrivance, involving the employment of an expert manipulator, with trained assistants, and impedimenta. In Germany, where the executioner wields an axe, there is the possibility of an absence of precision which fails to recommend the method. Quite a dramatic scene was witnessed at the execution of a female poisoner in the Kaiser’s dominions the other day. The story suggested a Sanscullotic (Carlyle is responsible for the word!) outrage of the French Terror. No, the executioner with the axe is a poor way of fulfilling the last rites of the law. If the Kneller portrait of James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, painted after execution, is faithful, the executioner was singularly adroit with his axe. But the use of the axe depends too much on personal dexterity in the evasion of the atrocious. As an institution it is, therefore, to be condemned. Hanging, on the other hand, has the Lee case as a perpetual warning against it. (It will be remembered that a murderer named Lee would not “hang.” He ultimately had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, from which, as an anomaly of the law, he emerged in good health, after serving some twenty years.) It is elaborate, and anything elaborate, in respect of such a matter as the death penalty, savours of anachronism. Of course, there is some traditional or legendary nonsense about the ignominy of hanging as opposed to execution by the axe, but humanly enforced death is as bad in one form as in another so far as the victim goes, so that the argument hardly impresses one with its strength. Then, too, the whole scheme is barbarous in practice; not that the would-be murderer is more deterred by the fear of hanging than he would be by the fear of death from a volley of muskets, but the machinery necessary for carrying out a death sentence by hanging is out-of-date, crude, and not compatible with the advance of the times. By far the simplest, cheapest, most effective, worthy means of supporting the majesty of the law in its supreme act of retribution is by the shooting of murderers on the day set for execution. Half a dozen soldiers, drafted from the nearest barracks, could be ordered to fire a volley at the condemned man in the prison yard, or in any other place convenient to the authorities. The inclusion of soldiers need not necessarily be a stumbling-block. Armed prison warders, with some substantial idea of the uses of a gun, would fulfil the same purpose. Death, to the condemned man, would be just as humane in the abruptness of its arrival as the “six foot drop” (or whatever prison parlance and the height of the victim make it). The only good thing about hanging is its comparative cleanliness. That is to say, there is not a deluge of blood from the person hanged, as there is in the case of one decapitated. That is all very well, but death from a volley of muskets does not produce the effects associated with a slaughter-house, either.