The Roman Empire, when society had fallen into extreme corruption, recalling many symptoms of our own epoch, vainly promulgated laws which visited celibacy, adultery, and incest--``venus prodigiosa''--with ``the vengeance of the sword and punishments of the utmost severity.'' Dio Cassius (``Hist. Rom.,'' lxxvi. 16) says that in the city of Rome alone, after the law of Septimus Severus, there were three thousand charges of adultery. But the stringent laws against these crimes continued to the days of Justinian, which shows that the crimes had not been checked; and, as Gibbon says (``Decline and Fall,'' ch. 44), the Scatinian law against ``venus nefanda'' had fallen into abeyance through lapse of time and the multitude of offenders. Yet we see in our own days, as in France, that there are some who would oppose celibacy with no other remedy than a law passed for the purpose. Since medi<ae>val times the increasing gentleness of <p 83>manners has caused a diminution of crimes of blood, once so numerous that there was need of sundry ``truces'' and ``peaces,'' notwithstanding the harsh penalties of previous centuries. And Du Boys called Cettes simple because, after giving a table of shocking punishments in the Germany of his day (the fifteenth century), he marvelled that all these pains and torments had not prevented the increase of crimes. Imperial Rome deluded herself with the idea that she could stamp out Christianity with punishments and tortures, which, however, only seemed to fan the flame. In the same way Catholic Europe hoped to extinguish Protestantism by means of vindictive persecution, and only produced the opposite effect, as always happens. If the Reformed faith does not strike root in Italy, France, and Spain, that must be explained by psychological reasons proper to those nations, independently of the stake and of massacres, for it did not strike root even when religious belief was liberated from its fetters. This does not prevent all governments in every land from continuing to believe that, in order to arrest the spread of certain political or social doctrines, there is nothing better than to pass exceptional penal laws, forgetting that, with ideas and prejudices just as with steam, compression increases the expansive force. Popular education has swept away the so-called crimes of magic and witchcraft, though they had withstood the most savage punishments of antiquity and medi<ae>val times.