the last; terror hardly prevents crime, never does it inspire virtue. Does any one consider the effect of capital punishment on the criminals themselves? Either they brave it with reckless impudence; or, inanimate, they suffer it, half dead with terror; or they offer their heads with profound and sincere repentance. Now the punishment is insufficient for those who defy it; useless for those who are already morally dead; excessive for those who repent with sincerity. Let us repeat it: society does not kill the murderer to cause him suffering, or to inflict the _lex talionis_; it kills him to prevent him from doing harm; it kills him that the example of his punishment may serve as a warning to murderers _to come._ We think that the punishment is barbarous, and that it does not sufficiently terrify. If this assertion is doubted, we will recall many proved facts of the deep horror expressed by hardened criminals for solitary confinement. Is it not known that some have committed murders in order to be condemned to death, preferring this punishment to a cell? What, then, would be their horror, when _blindness_, joined to solitary confinement, would deprive them of the hope of escape--a hope which he preserves, and which he sometimes realizes, even in a dungeon and loaded with irons. And touching this matter, we also think that the abolishment of capital punishment will be one of the forced consequences of solitary confinement; the alarm which this punishment inspires the generation who at this moment people the prisons and the galleys, being such, that many among these incorrigibles prefer to incur the highest penalty known to the law, than imprisonment in a cell; then, doubtless, the punishment of death ought to be suppressed, in order to sweep away this last and frightful alternative. CHAPTER XXVIII. MARTIAL AND THE SLASHER.