Justice is administered more and more humanely, that is, morally. It is a century since legal torture was abolished. Society is ashamed to get at the truth easily by torturing a suspect who after all may be innocent. The condemned man is no longer branded or mutilated; he suffers no corporal ill-treatment of which the results can never be obliterated. Capital punishment is still a blot on the honour of civilization. But for more than a century now, since the time of Beccaria, it has been violently opposed and has already been abolished in some states; the others will no doubt have to follow suit within a short time. Consider that in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century a thief was hanged if he had stolen a thing of no more value than the rope that was to hang him, and even children of fourteen years were condemned to this fate. To-day the judge pronounces sentence of death, even where it is still legal, with grave misgivings and searchings of conscience, and the execution, formerly a public spectacle, is carried out more or less secretly, because the conviction is gradually ripening in society that by the cold-blooded killing of a man it is perpetrating a crime which it must keep as secret as possible. The sentence is now almost everywhere deferred, and thus the conviction becomes a very emphatic warning which points out the path of repentance, of conversion and improvement to the guilty man, and leaves him the possibility of becoming a decent human being again. Special courts for children mitigate the stern penal code and modify it according to the needs of unripe, youthful characters. Imprisonment for debt is a half-forgotten thing of the past and regarded more or less as a joke. What these changes have in common is that they one and all indicate a deepening of the community's feeling of duty and responsibility towards the individual, greater respect for persons on the part of the law, an increase of the will to resist the first impulse of anger, revenge and mercilessness. These tendencies, however, are the very essence of Morality. I forbear to adduce as a proof of progress that the Inquisition no longer rules and nowhere burns its victims. For actually there is no greater toleration of those who hold other opinions than there was formerly. Religious toleration is explained by the fact that the people's consciousness no longer attaches such enormous importance to religion as in past centuries. But political, æsthetic and philosophical antagonisms arouse as much bloodthirsty rage to-day as did formerly heresy in religion, and opponents would unhesitatingly apply torture and the stake to one another if the great mass of the people would develop sufficiently enthusiastic zeal for their views to allow their raging fanaticism to have recourse to violence, as it once permitted domineering religious orthodoxy to do.