represented, so that the last detail, including the breakfast bill of fare, may be graphically set before the hungry mob to take the place of the real tragedy that they had the right to witness in the good old days. Many states to-day have provided that executions shall be inside the penitentiary walls, that the victim shall be wakened, if perchance he is asleep, in the darkness and dead of night; that he shall be hurried off alone and unobserved and hastily put to death outside the gaze of any curious eye; that this barbarism shall be done, this unholy, brutal deed committed in silence, in darkness, that the heavens and earth alike may cover up the shocking crime, from which a sensitive public conscience stands aghast. The ever-present public press in many cases is allowed to print only the barest details of the bloody scene, so that oblivion may the more quickly and deeply cover this crowning infamy of the state. The abolition of public hangings may speak something for the sensitiveness, or at least, the squeamishness of the state. But it is evident that all of this is a terrible admission of guilt upon the part of those who uphold this crime. It is possible that one might believe at least in the sincerity of those who argue that punishment prevents crime, if these terrible scenes of violence were carried out in open day before the multitude, and fully understood and discussed in all their harrowing, shocking details of cruelty and blood. If the sight of punishment terrorizes men from the commission of crime then, of course, punishment should be as open as the day. In so far as the state is successful in keeping secret the execution of its victim, in this far does it abandon every claim of prevention and rests its case for punishment on vengeance and cruelty alone. The rulers of this generation, who are ashamed of their deeds, may be wiser and more sensitive than those of the last, but our ancestors, although less refined, were much more logical and infinitely more honest than are we. The whole question of punishment is not only proven but fully admitted by our rulers in their dealings with the death penalty. It is now everywhere admitted that the brutalizing effects of public executions are beyond dispute. It was only after the completest evidence that the believers in the beneficence of punishment and violence abandoned public executions, for to abandon these was to utterly abandon the principle on which all punishment is based.