on a multitude of circumstances which we neither can know, nor could estimate if we did. The State, too, is just as incompetent to estimate the severity of the infliction as the guilt of the offence. How is the legislator who awards, or the judge who pronounces, to ascertain the weight and bearing of any given sentence upon any individual culprit? The same penalty which to one man would be almost too lenient for a theft, may, to a differently organized and differently trained offender, be too severe almost for a murder. The educated convict, whose ungoverned passion led him to a heinous but a single crime, would be driven mad by the association and the _entourage_ which the habitual and hardened ruffian would find congenial and even pleasant. Punishment which _retributes_, like vengeance which _repays_, can, by its very term, belong only to that higher intelligence which can estimate aright both the debt to be repaid, and the intrinsic value of the coin in which repayment is awarded. The thing to be done, then, being ascertained, the next point for consideration is how to do it. Now, society may protect itself against habitual criminals in three ways, separately or in combination. It may deal with him so as to _deter_ him, to _reform_ him, or to _get rid_ of him. It may so arrange and contrive its penalties as to frighten him from bad courses, or to incapacitate him from recurring to them, or to persuade him to amend them. And, putting out of view the very few whom it will or can hang, it has to effect these objects by such secondary punishments as lie within its reach, as the public purse will pay for, and public conscience and feeling will allow the State to inflict. MEMBERS.