their sway, they call on the pardoning power to rescind their cruel acts. In all these cases of pardons reflection shows the judges that the punishment meted out was at least too severe. The difference is in the frame of mind of the judge when engaged in the business of administering judgment, and when in the mood for listening to those feelings of human charity which are the diviner part of man. Punishment, to in any way be justified, should diminish the sum of human misery, the result of the bitterness and hatred of men. But here, as everywhere else, punishment falls short. Wherever the judgment of courts enters it is to corrupt and to destroy. The misery and suffering entailed on man by scaffolds, racks, blocks, dungeons and jails has never yet begun to be told. Blood and misery and degradation has marked the administration of punishment Since man first penned his fellow men, Like brutes, within an iron pen. Let any reasoning being consider the tens of thousands who have been burned, and hanged, and boiled, and otherwise put to death for witchcraft; the millions for heresy; the thousands of noble victims who have suffered for treason; the victims of fire, of torture, of scaffold, of rack and of dungeon, for all the conceivable crimes since time began. Let him consider the oceans of blood and rivers of tears shed by the force and brutality of the rulers of the world; the cruelty, torture and suffering heaped upon the helpless, the weak, the unfortunate; and then ask himself if he believes that punishment is good. Even could violence ever prevent crime, the brutality, suffering, blood and crime of the rulers has towered mountain high above that of the weak and obscure victims whose wrongs they have pretended to avenge. And this cruelty does not abate. It is simple madness that doubts the justice of past condemnations and believes in the righteous judgments of to-day. No condemnation is just, and no judgment is righteous. All violence and force are cruel, unjust and barbarous, and cannot be sustained by the judgment of men.