The penalty of death was indeed inflicted, especially in the older codes, with a frequency reminding us of the European codes of a hundred years ago. But as regards citizens there were two mitigations which made even these severe laws milder and more civilised than most of ours. In the first place, there was generally facility given to the man who was condemned to escape over the frontier, and except in cases of great crimes against the state, extradition was not thought of. Exile was of course a severe penalty, for it meant living abroad as a foreigner, not protected by the safeguards that encompassed the citizens around him. Secondly, the manner in which the death sentence was carried out was infinitely more humane and polite than our abominable executions. The case of Socrates is no doubt familiar to you all. He was left free of chains to talk with his friends and the cup of poison was placed beside him, to be taken before the setting of the sun. Even the jailor is represented as a humane and civil man, who carried out his function with every consideration. I will not deny that these very advanced features in Greek law were in contrast to some still barbarous survivals; I mean the torturing of slaves and the severity of making a death sentence follow on the majority of one in a very large jury. But survivals of barbarism were but yesterday frequent enough with ourselves. Let us now turn to the characteristics of the _civil_ law, by which I mean the laws controlling the holding of property, the making of contracts, and bequests by testament. I cannot see in the many contracts we have from Greece, or from Egyptian Greece, when settled by Greece immigrants, that the general spirit or the accuracy of these documents differs from those of our day, except that the penalties for breach of contract seem much severer than ours. In the case of a money obligation, the debtor who did not repay within a fixed date was commonly fined fifty per cent. for his delay. There may have been many cases of loans in kind, _e.g._, of seed corn, where such a penalty was not unreasonable, for there are things which are very valuable at a certain season, and which after that must lie useless for many months. But on the whole I think the Greek idea of keeping a contract was stricter than ours, and the law more severe. Such was also the case with the Roman law, which was borrowed from the Greek.