The same conclusions may be drawn from an observation of the methods of legal punishment. Recklessness of human life is one of the surest symptoms of barbarism, whether life is taken by law or by assassination. As men grow civilized, and learn to rate the spiritual higher and higher above the physical life, human life grows sacred. The Turk orders off the head of a slave almost without a serious thought. The New Zealanders have murdered men by scores, to supply their dried and grinning heads to English purchasers, who little imagined the cost at which they were obtained. This is the way in which life is squandered in savage societies. Up to a comparatively high point of civilization, the law makes free with life, long after the private expenditure of it has been checked or has ceased. Duels, brawls, assassinations, have nearly been discontinued, and even war in some measure discountenanced, before the law duly recognises the sacredness of human life. But the time comes. One generation after another grows up with a still improving sense of the majesty of life,--of the mystery of the existence of such a being as man,--of the infinity of ideas and emotions in the mind of each, and of the boundlessness of his social relations. These recognitions may not be express; but they are sufficiently real to hold back the hand from quenching life. The reluctance to destroy such a creation is found to be on the increase. Men prefer suffering wrong to being accessary to so fearful an act as what now appears a judicial murder: the law is left unused,--is evaded,--and it becomes necessary to alter it. Capital punishments are restricted,--are further restricted,--are abolished. Such is the process. It is now all but completed in the United States: it is advancing rapidly in England. During its progress further light is thrown on the moral notions of a represented people by a change in the character of other (called inferior) punishments. Bodily torments and disfigurements go out. Torture and mutilation are discontinued, and after a while the grosser mental inflictions. The pillory (as mere ignominious exposure) was a great advance upon the maiming with which it was once connected; but it is now discontinued as barbarous. All ignominious exposure will ere long be considered equally barbarous,--including capital punishment, of which such exposure is the recommendatory principle. To refer once more to the Pennsylvania case,--these notions of ignominious exposure are there so far outgrown, that avoidance of it is the main principle of the management. Seclusion, under the guardianship of the law, is there the method,--on the principle of consideration to the weak, and of supreme regard to the feeling of self-respect in the offender,--the feeling in which he is necessarily most deficient. When we consider the brutalizing methods of punishment in use in former times, and now in some foreign countries,