One of the questions which is most frequently put to me is, whether I consider capital punishment is a right and proper thing. To this I can truly answer that I do. For my own part I attach much weight to the Scripture injunction, "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed," and I think that the abolition of capital punishment would be a defiance of the divine command. Therefore I would not abolish capital punishment altogether, but, as I shall explain later, I would greatly alter the conditions under which it is imposed. Perhaps many of my readers will say that the Scriptural command should have no weight, and others will say that it was a command given under the "dispensation of Law," while we live under the "dispensation of Grace." Therefore I would argue that, quite apart from any consideration of a religious nature, capital punishment is absolutely necessary for the checking of the greatest criminals. In the discharge of my duties as a policeman, both in the Nottingham, in the Bradford, and in the West Riding Police force, I have had many chances of studying the ways of life and thought of the criminal classes, and I have paid a great deal of attention to the subject. As the result of my experience I can safely say that capital punishment, and "the cat," are the only legal penalties that possess any real terrors for the hardened criminal, for the man who might be called a "professional" as distinguished from an "amateur" ruffian. Such a man does what he can to keep out of prison, because he dislikes restraint, and routine, and sobriety, but this dislike is not strong enough to deter him from any crime which offers even a chance of escaping scot-free; and I do not think that the fear of imprisonment ever occurs to him when he has once got criminal work actually in hand. Penal servitude, even for life, has no very acute terrifying influence, partly because no criminal ever believes that it will be a reality in his case, as he feels sure that he will get a commutation of sentence; and partly because, even if he were sure that the imprisonment were actually for life, he knows that prison life is not such a dreadful fate, after all--when one gets used to it. But when it comes to a question of a death sentence it is quite another matter. Death is a horrible mystery, and a death on the scaffold, a cold-blooded, pre-determined, and ignominious death is especially horrible to the criminal mind. As a rule the most desperate criminals are those who are most terrified by the thought of death at the hands of the executioner, possibly, because the most desperate men spring from the most superstitious class of the community, and have the greatest dread of that "something" after death which they cannot define.