In the grand matter of Legislation I do not know that there is much more to be done than has already been achieved by the abolition of those public punishments of criminals—hanging, drawing and quartering, flogging at the cart’s tail, and the pillory—which must have been frightfully prolific of cruel passions in the spectators. To have taken part in such executions, _e.g._ in the old stonings to death, in the burning of witches and heretics, or in the minor but yet barbarous and cowardly pelting of the helpless wretches in the pillory, must have been an apprenticeship worthy of a Red Indian. Even to have been a passive spectator of a Newgate execution in later years, amid the yelling crowd, must have been excessively demoralizing, and in fact was at last recognized by the Legislature to be so, instead of a wholesome warning. It is a cause for rejoicing that there is an end of this kind of contagious emotion in England, except in the case of experiments on animals, of which the Act of 1876 sanctions the exhibition to classes under special certificates which require the subjects to be fully anæsthetized. On this point the warning of the late lamented Professor Rolleston ought, I think, to have sufficed. He told the Royal Commission: “The sight of a living, bleeding, and quivering organism most undoubtedly does act in a particular way upon what Dr. Carpenter calls the emotiono-motor nature in us.... When men are massed together, the emotiono-motor nature is more responsive, it becomes more sensitive to impression than it does at other times, and that of course bears very greatly on the question of interference with vivisections before masses” (_Minutes_, 1287[11]). The time will come when it will be looked upon as a monstrous inconsistency that the spectacle of the execution of murderers should be shut off from the _adult population on account of its recognized ill effects in fostering contagious cruelty_, and, at the same time, as many as nineteen certificates should be issued in one year by the Home Office, specially authorizing the mutilation of harmless animals _before classes of young men and women_.