motived and so circumstantiated will not come within the notion of suicide properly defined. Meantime, may not this tend to the encouragement of suicide in general, and without discrimination of its species? No: Donne's arguments have no prospective reference or application; they are purely retrospective. The circumstances necessary to create an act of mere self- homicide can rarely concur, except in a state of disordered society, and during the _cardinal_ revolutions of human history: where, however, they _do_ concur, there it will not be suicide. In fact, this is the natural and practical judgment of us all. We do not all agree on the particular cases which will justify self-destruction: but we all feel and involuntarily acknowledge (_implicitly_ acknowledge in our admiration, though not explicitly in our words or in our principles), that there _are_ such cases. There is no man, who in his heart would not reverence a woman that chose to die rather than to be dishonored: and, if we do not say, that it is her duty to do so, _that_ is because the moralist must condescend to the weakness and infirmities of human nature: mean and ignoble natures must not be taxed up to the level of noble ones. Again, with regard to the other sex, corporal punishment is its peculiar and _sexual_ degradation; and if ever the distinction of Donne can be applied safely to any case, it will be to the case of him who chooses to die rather than to submit to that ignominy. _At present_, however, there is but a dim and very confined sense, even amongst enlightened men (as we may see by the debates of Parliament), of the injury which is done to human nature by giving legal sanction to such brutalizing acts; and therefore most men, in seeking to escape it, would be merely shrinking from a _personal_ dishonor. Corporal punishment is usually argued with a single reference to the case of him who suffers it; and _so_ argued, God knows that it is worthy of all abhorrence: but the weightiest argument against it--is the foul indignity which is offered to our common nature lodged in the person of him on whom it is inflicted. _His_ nature is _our_ nature: and, supposing it possible that _he_ were so far degraded as to be unsusceptible of any influences but those which address him through the brutal part of his nature, yet for the sake of ourselves--No! not merely for ourselves, or for the human race now existing, but for the sake of human nature, which trancends all existing participators of that nature-- we should remember that the evil of corporal punishment is not to be measured by the poor transitory criminal, whose memory and offence are soon to perish: these, in the sum of things, are as nothing: the injury which can be done him, and the injury which he can do, have so momentary an existence that they may be safely neglected: but the abiding injury is to the most august interest which for the mind of man can have any existence,--viz.