Assuming the man is bad, where is the judge who can measure the punishment he ought to have? How many endless, silent, shameful days, each made of hours that seem eternities, should he be confined for this? How many days should drag their endless weary length into months and years before the act should be atoned? And is justice done when the victim, old and bent, and silent, and gray, with health destroyed and character and hope forever gone, is once, more led out into the strange, bewildering light of day? There can be no measure for human conduct. All scales, rules and measures are valueless when used to judge the soul. Even time cannot be counted. The judge upon the bench lightly consigns his victim to a prison pen. He measures the victim’s years by the swiftly gliding days that pass like magic in his joyous life. To the judge, time strides with seven league boots; even the grim specter at the end, the one skeleton at his feast, even this ever-present shadow but hastens the magic flight of years. But the clock that ticks away the joyous wasted moments at the banquet hall is not the same time-piece that hangs upon the penitentiary walls. One pendulum leaps gladly back and forth; the other moves with the weight and gravity of human life, of human death, of endless agony, of unmitigated pain. Time is the most obstinate of the delusive gifts that fate bequeathes to man. When we would have her speed she moves with leaden foot. When we would have her halt she flies with magic wings. * * * * * Rulers have invented and used all sorts of punishments and constantly alternated from one to the other; each one in use seeming to be inferior to some one hitherto untried. Corporal punishment has respectively come and gone. Public floggings and private floggings, tortures, and death in various ways, have met the approval and then the disapproval of the governing power. But with all of them, crime has gone on and on, unmindful alike of the form or extent of the punishment in vogue. The effect of an act of cruelty and violence can never be measured or understood. No one can tell the full consequences that occur to every human being when the state puts one to death, or flogs, or maims, or imprisons, or even fines. A violent act produces injury, hardship and suffering to the victim who is powerless in the strong grasp of the law. But the evil does not end with him. In ever-widening circles the results of cruelty move on and on until to some degree or part they reach every member of society. Unless punishment lessens the sum of human suffering, increases the measure of human joy, and thus lengthens and adds to life, it has no right to be.