was pronounced December 16, 1564, as follows: “I condemn you to be walled up in a place enclosed by four walls, where, with anguish of heart and abundance of tears, you shall bewail your sins and grievous offences committed against the majesty of God, and the holy mother Church and the religion of St. Francis, the founder of your order.” A bishop, who should impose such a punishment now-a-days, would be very properly declared insane and divested of his office. Much ridicule has been cast upon the so-called “Blue Laws” of Connecticut on account of the narrowness and pettiness of their prevailing spirit. From our present point of view they are absurd and in many respects atrocious, but compared with the penal codes of that time they mark a great advance in human legislation. They reduced the number of crimes, then punishable in England by death, from two hundred and twenty-three to fourteen. In the mother-country, as late as the seventeenth century, counterfeiters and issuers of false coin were condemned to be boiled to death in oil by slow degrees. The culprit was suspended over the cauldron and gradually let down into it, first boiling the feet, then the legs and so on, until all the flesh was separated from the bones and the body reduced to a skeleton. The Puritans of New England, relentless as they were in their dealings with sectaries, were never so ruthless as this; nor is it probable that they would have inflicted capital punishment upon their own “stubborn and rebellious sons,” or upon persons who “worship any other God but the Lord God,” had it not been for precedents recorded in laws enacted by a semi-civilized people thousands of years ago and supposed to have been dictated by divine wisdom. They failed to perceive the incongruity of attempting to rear a democratic commonwealth on theocratic foundations and made the fatal mistake of planning their structure after what they regarded as the perfect model of the Jewish Zion. If we compare these barbarities with the law recently enacted by the legislature of the state of New York, whereby capital punishment is to be inflicted as quickly and painlessly as possible by means of electricity, we shall be able to appreciate the immense difference between the mediæval and the modern spirit in the conception and execution of penal justice.