Of course I do not mean to advocate the death penalty for every premeditated infraction of the law, nor do I know how many convictions should be considered as proving the offender an habitual criminal; but certainly I think that, having exceeded the number allowed him, his right to life should be held to have lapsed and he should be removed from this vale of tears forthwith. The fact that a man who habitually breaks the law may be better than another who habitually obeys it, or the fact that he who is convicted may be less guilty than he who escapes conviction, has nothing to do with the matter. If we can not remove all the irreclaimable the greater is the expediency of removing all that we can catch and convict. The law’s inadequacy and inconsistency are patent, but they constitute the silliest plea for “mercy” that stupidity has ever invented. II This is an age of mercy to the merciless. The good Scriptural code, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” has fallen into the sere and yellow leaf: it is a creed outworn. We have replaced it with a regime of “reformation,” a penology of persuasion. In our own country this sign and consequence of moral degeneration, this power and prevalence of the mollycoddle, are especially marked. We no longer kill our assassins; as a rule, the only disadvantages they suffer for killing us are those incident to detention for acquittal, with a little preaching to remind them of their mortality. Wherefore our homicide list is about twice annually that of the battle of Gettysburg. The American prison of to-day is carefully outfitted with the comforts of home. Those who succeed in breaking into it find themselves distinctly advantaged in point of housing, and are clothed and fed better than they ever were before, or will be elsewhere. Light employment, gentle exercise, cleanliness, and sound sleep reward them, and when expelled their one ambition is to go back. The “reformation” consists in lifting them to a higher plane of criminality: the man who enters as a stupid thief is graduated a competent forger, and comes back (if he can) with an augmented self-respect and an ambition to kill the warden. Some of us old fogies think that a prison was best worth its price to the community when it was a place that a rascal would rather die out of than get into; but we are _voces in deserto_ and in the ramp and roar of the new penology altogether unheard.