tion to the crime must be clearly evident. Excess and defect are equally fatal to its efficacy. But experience proves that of a certain class of malefactors, the only good prisoner is a dead prisoner. You may punish them ever so severely in the hope that they will obey " not only for wrath's but for conscience' sake," but eventually you will find the basic motive of their abhorrence of crime and respect for law is the active lictor by the side of the ruler. To merely kill a wayward limb that threatens the symmetry of some splendid tree, or to apply soothing lotions to a cancerous growth, would be little creditable to gardener or physician, and vastly more reprehensible and disastrous would it be for the government to visit capital crimes with merely civil death, or withhold the knife from a dangerous ulcer on the body politic. Nor must we lose sight here of the law of imitation, and the necessity the State is under of dealing at times with epidemics of crime. That a little leaven corrupteth the whole mass, is especially true of the leaven of iniquity. Avarice, lust, desire of revenge, etc., are as so many ever-ready and deadly mines beneath the surface of society, and a single explosion usually precipitates a general upheaval. To an individual highly charged with such passions, the satisfying of them is of all good things the best. Not even penal servitude for life can altogether embitter the sweetness of revenge, for the youthful desperado receives his sentence with a scornful smile, and coolly marches off to prison with a laugh and a swagger. But even in his most desperate calculations the
