has been a subject of much thought and discussion during the generation just passed. It has been, and still is, an open question among the more thoughtful, whether the subject of the proper treatment of criminals has been regarded aright. We may justly plead for benevolent sympathy without being the apologist of crime. Conscience must be remembered as well as the cry of pitying tenderness, and punishment must have a meaning, or the distinctions of right and wrong are lost. "It will be a sad day," as one has truly said, "when those who violate our laws are more pitied than blamed." Christians are bound by their religion to labor for the prevention of crime, and for the strict application of all righteous laws to the criminal; to impress as they can the awfulness of sin on their own and on other's consciences, and to recall the fallen back to virtue, shamed by his sin, and resolute and strong in the working of a regenerated will, thus vindicating and imitating "the goodness and severity of God." The treatment of convicts in our prisons at the present time is generally more in accordance with these considerations than in the past, when severity was deemed more needful as applied to criminals who were subjects of total depravity, than a proportionate mercy, which regarded them not only as lost ones, but as capable of a possible restoration to their rightful Owner and Almighty Friend. The reform schools in our different States are working in this Christian direction. The subject of _Capital Punishment_ has elicited much attention during the time of which we are speaking. It has been discussed in newspapers, pamphlets, legislatures, pulpits, and lyceum halls. Some of our States have abolished the gallows, others are agitating this subject in their legislatures. The present governor (Long) of Massachusetts, in his annual messages of the last two years, has recommended the abolition of the death penalty. A large number of ministers of the Universalist Church have constantly affirmed their opposition to it. Rev. Charles Spear published a sensible work on the subject, and Rev. Hosea Ballou, D. D., thirty years since, gave the whole question a very thorough investigation, in reply to Rev. Dr. Cheever of New York, and others.[33] Michigan was the first State in the Union to abolish the death penalty, and a late Report makes the statement that, with a population of 1,500,000, no man has been executed in the State during the last thirty-five years, and that a less number of murders have been perpetrated during the last ten years, in ratio to the population, than during the same decade in any other State where public or even private executions have prevailed.[34] Capital punishment has also been abolished in Maine. _The Position and Work of Woman_