In the criminal law, changes were recommended in the direction of giving a better chance to accused persons. Trials were to be prompt and public, and counsel were to be allowed. The prisons were to be improved. The Third Estate desired that punishment should be the same for all classes, and that the death penalty should be decapitation, a form of execution which had previously been reserved for the nobility. The thoroughness with which this reform was carried out some years later is very noticeable. The guillotine treated all sorts of men and women alike. It was a common request of the cahiers that the family of a man convicted and punished for crime should not be held to be disgraced, nor the relations of the culprit shut out from preferment. The former request shows a curious ignorance of what can and what cannot be done by legislation. Persons acquitted were to receive damages, either from the accuser, or from the state. Judges were to give reasons for their decisions. Arbitrary imprisonment by _lettre de cachet_ was, according to some cahiers, to be suppressed altogether; according to others it was to be regulated, but the practice retained where public policy or family discipline might require it.[Footnote: Domfront, _A. P._, i. 723, Section 6. Amiens, _A. P._, i. 747, Section 7. The cahiers show that everybody was opposed to the use of _lettres de cachet_ as they then existed; but most of the cahiers that had anything to say about them expressed a desire to keep something of the kind. They are considered necessary for reasons of state, or in the interest of families. Desjardins, 407. The author of the _Histoire du gouvernment de France depuis l'Assemblée des Notables_, a good, sensible, middle-class man, approves of them (260). Mercier (viii. 242) considers them useful and even necessary.] CHAPTER XXII. SOCIAL AND ECONOMICAL MATTERS IN THE CAHIERS.