persons convicted, all of whom underwent the penalty of death; in the second 83 were convicted, of whom 31 only were executed. Now see how these two very different methods of dealing with the crime of murder affected the commission of it _in the years immediately following_. The number of commitments for murder, in the four years immediately following those in which all persons convicted were executed, was 270. “In the four years immediately following those in which little more than one-third of the persons convicted were executed, there were but 222, being 48 less. If we compare the commitments in the following years with those in the first years, we shall find that, immediately after the examples of unsparing execution, the crime _increased nearly 13 per cent._, and that after commutation was the practice and capital punishment the exception, it _decreased 17 per cent._ “In the same parliamentary return is an account of the commitments and executions in London and Middlesex, _spread over a space of_ 32 _years_, ending in 1842, divided into two cycles of 16 years each. In the first of these, 34 persons were _convicted_ of murder, _all of whom were executed_. In the second, 27 were _convicted_, and only 17 executed. The _commitments_ for murder during the latter long period, with 17 executions, were _more than one half_ fewer than they had been in the former _long_ period with _exactly double the number of executions_. This appears to us to be as conclusive upon our argument as any statistical illustration can be upon any argument professing to place successive events in the relation of cause and effect to each other. How justly then is it said in that able and useful periodical work, now in the course of publication at Glasgow, under the name of the _Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and Secondary Punishment_, ‘the greater the number of executions, the greater the number of murders; the smaller the number of executions, the smaller the number of murders. The lives of her Majesty’s subjects are less safe with a hundred executions a year than with fifty; less safe with fifty than with twenty-five.’” Similar results have followed from rendering public executions more and more infrequent, in Tuscany, in Prussia, in France, in Belgium. Wherever capital punishments are diminished in their number, there, crimes diminish in their number too.