is what our virtues feed upon; in the thin air of universal morality the
altar-fires of honor and the beacons of conscience could not be kept
alight. A community without crime would be a community without warm and
elevated sentiments--without the sense of justice, without generosity,
without courage, without mercy, without magnanimity--a community of
small, smug souls, uninteresting to God and uncoveted by the Devil. We
can have, and do have, too much crime, no doubt; what the wholesome
proportion is none can tell. Just now we are running a good deal to
murder, but he who can gravely attribute that phenomenon, or any part of
it, to infliction of the death penalty, instead of to virtual immunity
from any penalty at all, is justly entitled to the innocent satisfaction
that comes of being a simpleton.


III

The New Woman is against the death penalty, naturally, for she is hot
and hardy in the conviction that whatever is is wrong. She has visited
this world in order to straighten things about a bit, and is in distress
lest the number of things be insufficient to her need. The matter is
important variously; not least so in its relation to the new heaven and
the new earth that are to be the outcome of woman suffrage. There can be
no doubt that the vast majority of women have sentimental objections to
the death penalty that quite outweigh such practical considerations in
its favor as they can be persuaded to comprehend. Aided by the minority
of men afflicted by the same mental malady, they will indubitably effect
its abolition in the first lustrum of their political "equality." The
New Woman will scarcely feel the seat of power warm beneath her before
giving to the assassin's "unhand me, villain!" the authority of law. So
we shall make again the old experiment, discredited by a thousand