I do not propose to give more than a few words to the question of capital punishment, because it does not seem to be any longer a question of much magnitude or importance. A century, even three-quarters of a century, ago it was a different matter. In England especially capital punishment seems to have flourished luxuriantly. A writer in Elizabeth’s reign says that in Henry VIII.’s time seventy-two thousand thieves and vagabonds were hanged. The statement is set down on hearsay evidence only, but is sufficient to show that the number must have been very large. About a century ago more criminals, it is said, were put to death in England than in any other part of Europe; many persons still living remember the days of wholesale hanging, and even the execution of a child of twelve for rioting. It is less than half a century since a child of nine was condemned to death for stealing paint, value twopence-halfpenny, and since men were hanged for stealing sheep and postoffice letters. There can be little doubt that capital punishment is dying out. In Switzerland, in England, in Italy, for example, the tendency is very clearly marked. Whether its complete extinction is altogether a matter for rejoicing is a question concerning which there is not complete unanimity among those whose opinions carry most weight. An impressive body of opinion is in favour of putting instinctive criminals to death, not out of revenge, but in the spirit in which Galen and Seneca advocated the destruction of incorrigible offenders against social life, regarding them as diseased members to be removed for the advantage of the whole social body. Garofalo, the distinguished Neapolitan lawyer, is perhaps the chief advocate of capital punishment among those who are working for legal reform. He points out that the death penalty is the only one the criminal really dreads, and tells of offenders who committed their crimes under the impression that capital punishment had been abolished, and that they were to be provided with food and shelter for the rest of their lives. On the other hand, it has also been shown that the _éclat_ and public interest involved in a trial for life or death serves as an incentive to the morbid vanity of criminals. Such a penalty as burning “for example of others, as hath been accustomed,” according to the phrasing of Henry VIII.’s statute, has been an example often enough in another sense than the statute intended.