toward. This is the common experience of all times. Not unfrequently the race has moved in a circle, as witness lost arts redis covered. Of the efficacy of the capital sen tence as a punitive law for any good purpose, let it only be asked, Is such punishment or law more efficacious than the law which makes imprisonment for life civil death? Of what use or benefit is life without liberty, and who can prove that the capital penalty punishes more? The writer will leave this article here in all safety for his views. He advocates a radical change in criminal juris prudence. But facing him with stubborn perversity will, for many long years to come, be conservatism in the premises, — conser vatism with the best of thin practical con siderations for the retention of the present system of the law of crime. All intelligent penetration into the root and truth of the phenomena to be remedied will be left for other than the legal profession to accomplish, as it always has been heretofore, — a fact made the more clear at this moment, when four new States are in the throes of birth, the principal obstetricians supervising the unusual parturition and its agonies, being each that usual babbling, frothy ninth part of a man who cuts a leading figure in our average State legislatures. The work this shallow bungler accomplishes is, as it always has been and ever will be "world without end," but transcription of musty obsoletisms and servile deference to a dead past and its dead letters, that should be left entombed till the veritable constitution-Zeus will be found, recognized, and importuned to thun der forth the truth of the thing at last. Sad enough is it to contemplate all this sorry public business in the nineteenth century, — to note the fog and darkness in the light! Yet, as the writer reflects over Torquemada's awful code, whose blood-curdling provisions De Voughlans with unconscious blasphemy solemnly declared to be derived from the law of God; as the writer recalls that the learned Bacon and even Aristotle favored torture to elicit evidence from a
witness or from an accused person; re calls also that in enlightened Scotland torture was still administered as a punish ment for crime in the eighteenth century, though the proud crown of royal England had generations before submissively bowed to the bill of rights and its declaration that "cruel and unusual punishment shall not be inflicted " (a provision copied word for word thus in our national and State constitu tions), — the writer recognizes that much which was in the past and should never have been at all among men, is wholly un done now, though time was when it stood done fast and firmly enough, fashioned and finished under sanction of some alldeluded and deluding authority then control ling untrammelled, — authority recognized as sufficient, bedizened with crown and tinsel and bowed to in all servility, with the pomp, power, and circumstance of state hedging it round about, though wrong, utterly, essen tially, and ofttimes malevolently wrong throughout. Perhaps, therefore, the writer's strictures against the existing jurisprudence of crime should have been couched in mild, persuasive diction. And true it is that fault finding can be pressed dispassionately and with considerate meekness. Then the dis cussion of the theme in hand might have purled along in inoffensive sing-song like a summer stream; for the slow world does move forward notwithstanding the omni present conservative and his indomitable ob struction in every wholesome effort at reform. And railing may not hasten things. But, reader, mark well this fact, that not till the genius of a Dickens — did but the writer have that or such! — not till the genius of a Dickens had lashed, satirized, ridiculed, and impaled the infamous abuses, of the British Chancery Court, — not till language lurid with denunciation had aroused a whole peo ple's indignation against those abuses, — not till all the talents of a Reade had illuminated the dark places in English prison manage ment, and disclosed the horror and brutality of its discipline in language that shook the
