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conformable to those principles, and that therefore, if we assume them to be correct, all such punishments should be abandoned. So long as human judgment shall be found fallible, some or all of those principles are outraged when we take the life of man. The "feelings of humanity," or some kindred sensations in the minds of jurors, have frequently—I might almost say universally, of late years—tended to render the punishment of our greatest criminals a matter of so much uncertainty, that there is good reason for supposing murderers are not unfrequently influenced by that consideration, when balancing the amount of chances in their minds, before giving way to their revengeful feelings. It often happens that jurors cannot bring their minds to be in any degree instrumental in the infliction of an irremediable punishment. For my own part, I conceive that a full justification of such a course is to be found in the fact, that innocent men have been found guilty and executed, the evidence of whose guilt was apparently so clearly set forth, that no man could have reasonable doubts on the subject. This is one of the grounds on which I contend that death punishment must ever render the conviction of the accused a matter of greater uncertainty, than in cases where that extreme penalty is not present to the minds of the jurors. I would not convey the idea that jurors should not in all cases weigh well the evidence which comes before them; but it is a fact, which we may not set aside in the consideration of this question, that the irremediable punishment of death is one which many men will not consent to inflict upon any human testimony; which proves the uncertainty of any punishment for the crime of murder.
Professor Hancock maintained, in the essay referred to, that the "justice of inflicting death depended upon its expediency; that is, upon the decision of the question, whether it is the most effectual punishment for preventing certain crimes." Without entering at large into this view of the question, I think I have proved, in previous portions of this paper, that such punishment cannot, according to the learned Professor's definition, be just, seeing that it is never expedient; inasmuch as there is sound reason for believing that it tends to increase, and not to diminish, the crime of murder. Indeed, this may be taken as a fact proved by some of the statistics I have given herein.
Before quitting the abstract of Professor Hancock's essay, there is one other point alluded to in it, to which I would shortly refer. He noticed the objection which is frequently made to the abolition of death punishment, derived from the text in Scripture, "Whose sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed;" which he answered, as the Archbishop of Dublin did in one of his lectures on political economy, in reply to a similar objection to the reception of that science, "that Scripture was intended to reveal to us religious truths, and was not given to teach us a complete system of jurisprudence, any more than other sciences; and, farther, that
