besides affording the transgressor a choice of weapons. He may prefer
a strychnine sandwich to the rope, or an unobtrusive blow-out-the-gas
transition to the electric chair; he may choose to loiter carelessly
in the path of a metropolitan trolley car; to caress the rear
elevation of an army mule, or insist upon reading a spring poem to
an athletic and busy editor. Many persons are particular upon these
subjects and, if the individual liberty, which is the watchword of
our nation, is to be preserved, some license should be allowed even a
felon under such conditions.

"If we really wish to decrease and discourage vice, however, let us
go about it in a logical manner and hold up a terrible example to
those premeditating crime. The prisoner should be visited by none but
religious advisers of every denomination, except on certain days when
free admittance should be granted to sketch artists, camera fiends,
elocutionists and young authors. All newspaper articles relating to
his case should be carefully suppressed; no reading matter furnished
him except dialect stories, and amateur photographs, taken by
visitors, should be hung upon the wall. Between times the prisoner
might be employed in washing dishes for a cooking school and testing
the products of pupils. After two months of unremitting toil,
according to this itinerary, he might be safely liberated, if life
remained, and it is safe to say that his experience, when related to
associates, would have a more deterrent effect upon the 'profesh' than
several kinds of death penalties could hope to produce."




SCIENCE AND WEATHER.