regarding the death penalty. Such revolting cruelty, they say, is foreign to the spirit of these days of higher civilization, and against it is the sentiment of the majority. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, punishment is cruel only when it is wanton, excessive, and that death is the only adequate penalty for certain crimes has already been proven. Besides, the advocates of life imprisonment claim it is severer punishment than death, so that the argument from cruelty might be turned against themselves. No doubt criminals to a man would vote for abolition, which of itself is a cogent reason for preserving the law as it stands. Anyhow, it might be well to place the blame of such cruelties where it belongs — not on the State, which regards them as lamentable necessities, but on the criminals themselves who evoke them.
Indeed it is hard to see how this movement can plume itself on being a product of superior culture, when its very existence depends upon the fact that certain types of the modern Christian are more shocked at the sight of sensible pain than by moral evil. The desire for the abolition of capital punishment is in line with the desire for the abolition of hell and many other disagreeable things. One kind lady went so far as to quote the dying Saviour's words: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." The force of the argument is not quite clear, for as it proves nothing or proves too much, the result in either case is identical. An ancient commentator on the Gospels makes the quaint
