executed. The commitments for murder during the latter long period,
with 17 executions, were more than one half fewer than they had been
in the former long period with exactly double the number of
executions. This appears to us to be as conclusive upon our
argument as any statistical illustration can be upon any argument
professing to place successive events in the relation of cause and
effect to each other. How justly then is it said in that able and
useful periodical work, now in the course of publication at Glasgow,
under the name of the Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and
Secondary Punishment, 'the greater the number of executions, the
greater the number of murders; the smaller the number of executions,
the smaller the number of murders. The lives of her Majesty's
subjects are less safe with a hundred executions a year than with
fifty; less safe with fifty than with twenty-five.'"


Similar results have followed from rendering public executions more
and more infrequent, in Tuscany, in Prussia, in France, in Belgium.
Wherever capital punishments are diminished in their number, there,
crimes diminish in their number too.

But the very same advocates of the punishment of Death who contend,
in the teeth of all facts and figures, that it does prevent crime,
contend in the same breath against its abolition because it does
not! "There are so many bad murders," say they, "and they follow in
such quick succession, that the Punishment must not be repealed."
Why, is not this a reason, among others, for repealing it? Does it
not go to show that it is ineffective as an example; that it fails
to prevent crime; and that it is wholly inefficient to stay that
imitation, or contagion, call it what you please, which brings one