These remarks are suggested by something in France. In that half-sister republic the guillotine, though still a lawful dissuader from the error of assassination, is not at the time of writing in actual use. Murderers are still sentenced to it, but always the sentence is commuted to imprisonment during life or good behavior. Coincidently with the decline of the guillotine there is a notable rise in the rate of assassination. Somebody having had the sagacity to suggest the possibility of something more than an accidental relation between the two phenomena, it occurred to a Parisian editor to collect “views” as to the expediency of again bringing knife and neck together in the good old way. He got views of all sorts of kinds, naturally, and knows almost as much about public opinion as he did before. It is interesting to note that the literary class is nearly a unit against the chopping-block, as was to be expected: persons who work with the head naturally set a high value upon it—an over-appraisement in their own case, for their heads are somewhat impaired by their habit of housing their hearts in them. There was an honorable minority: Mistral, the Provençal poet, who pointed out (in verse) that a people too squeamish to endure the shedding of criminal blood has taken a long step in the downward path leading to feebleness. Wherefore I say: Bravo, Mistral! You have done something to prove that not all poets are persons of criminal instincts. III There is a general tendency to attribute the popular distrust of the death penalty to the “softening” effect of civilization. One might accept that view without really agreeing with its expounder; for it is the human heart which the expounder believes to have been softened, whereas there is reason to think that the softening process has involved the human head. As a matter of fact, gentlemen experiencing an inhospitality to the death penalty (including those on the gallows) should not felicitate themselves; their feeling is due to quite other causes. It is mostly a heritage of unreason from the dark ages when in all Europe laws were made and enforced, with no great scruples of conscience, by conquerors and the descendants of conquerors alien in blood, language and manners. Between these and the masses of the original inhabitants there was no love lost. The peasantry hated their foreign oppressors with a silent antipathy which, like a covered fire, burned with a sullen and more lasting fervor for lack of vent. Hatred of the oppressor embraced hatred of all his works and ways, his laws included, and from hatred of particular laws to hatred of all law the transition was easy, natural and, human nature being what it is, inevitable.