On the whole, we may perhaps be well satisfied that capital punishment--“the shameful practice,” as it has been epigrammatically styled, “of hiring for a guinea an assassin to accomplish a sentence which the judge would not have the courage to carry out himself”--is threatened with extinction in civilised countries. It has the disadvantage of being irrevocable. There would be little chance of mistake if it were only applied to recidivists; but these are a class to whom it is rarely applied. It is certain that mistakes have occurred when in the opinion of the judge the evidence of guilt was absolutely convincing. It is true that the chief cause of this extinction in democratic countries is not the benefit of the criminal, or even the welfare of society; it is a tender regard for the sentiments of the general public. “To punish murder by lifelong imprisonment,” as Sir Robert Rawlinson observed, “is a far severer fate than sudden death, but it is not so revolting.” We have to see to it that our substitutes for the death penalty are of a humane and rational character, and that they afford an equal protection to society. It should never be possible to address to society the words which the daring Duc de Montausier addressed to Louis XIV. concerning a criminal who was finally executed after committing twenty murders: “This man has only committed one murder, the first, and it is you who, by letting him live, have committed the other nineteen.” But, as Benedikt well observes, to kill the criminal is never satisfactory, because we do not kill his accomplices, bad social conditions and defective institutions; we leave untouched the false social sentiments that urged the unmarried girl to kill her own child, or the rigid marriage system that made it easier for the man to kill his wife than to leave her or to allow of her leaving him. Moreover, it must be said that murderers, whom alone it is considered justifiable to eliminate by death, are not usually the most degraded of criminals or the most dangerous to society. In Russia, where capital punishment for common-law offences was abolished more than a century ago, murderers are condemned to hard labour for a period of years, after which they are settled in Siberia. “Eastern Siberia is full of liberated assassins,” remarks Prince Krapotkine, “and, nevertheless, there is hardly another country where you could travel and stay with greater security; while the unceasing robberies and murders of which Siberia complains now, take place precisely in Tomsk and throughout Western Siberia, whereto no murderers and only minor offenders are exiled. In the earlier part of this century it was not uncommon to find at an official’s house that the coachman was a liberated murderer, or that the nurse who bestowed such motherly care upon the children bore imperfectly obliterated marks of the branding-iron.”[90] Mr. Davitt, speaking from an extensive acquaintance