made the punishment for all sorts of crimes, always for the crimes of denying your Maker, or killing your ruler. After death, has come public flogging, standing in the stocks, ducking, maiming, down to the humane method of penning in a cage. No two sets of rulers have ever agreed upon the relative enormity of the various crimes, the sort of punishment they merited, the extent and duration of punishment, or the purpose to be accomplished by the punishment. One age has pronounced martyrs and worshiped as saints the criminals that another age has put to death. One law-making body repeals the crimes that another creates. Some judges with venerable wigs have pronounced solemn sentence of death upon helpless, defenceless old women for bewitching a cat. Grave judges have even sentenced animals to death after due and impartial trial for crime. The judges who pronounced sentence of death on women for witchcraft were as learned and good as those who to-day pronounce sentence for conspiracy and other crimes. It is quite as possible that another generation will look with the same horror on the subjects of our laws as we look upon those of the years that are gone. It is but a few years since a hundred different crimes were punishable with death in England, and the wise men of that day would not have believed that the empire could hold together had these extreme statutes been limited to one or two. But however drastic the laws at different periods of civilization, they have never been so broad but what a much larger number of blameworthy acts were outside than inside the code. Neither have they ever been enforced alike on all. The powerful could generally violate them with impunity, but the net was there to ensnare the victim whom they wished to catch. Neither has the method of determining the victim for these various laws been as accurate and scientific as is generally presumed. Sometimes it has been by torturing until the victim is made to confess; sometimes by wager of battle; sometimes by tying the feet and hands and throwing them into a pond, when if they sank they were innocent, if they swam they were guilty and promptly put to death. The modern method of arraying a defendant in court, prosecuted by able lawyers with ample resources, tried by judges who almost invariably believe in the prisoner’s guilt, defended as is usually the case by incompetent lawyers, and without means, is scarcely more liable to lead to correct results than the ancient forms. From the nature of things it is seldom possible to be sure about the commission of the act, and never possible to fix the moral responsibility of the person charged with crime. * * * * *