thus triumphantly vindicated. But it is enough that such assertions should be either contradictory to the known laws of nature, or exceed the limits of our experience, that their fallacy or irrelevancy to our consideration should be demonstrated. They persuade, indeed, only those who desire to be persuaded. This desire to be for ever as we are; the reluctance to a violent and unexperienced change, which is common to all the animated and inanimate combinations of the universe, is, indeed, the secret persuasion which has given birth to the opinions of a future state.     

       [1815; publ. 1840]     

  

  

       ON THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH     

       A FRAGMENT     

       The first law which it becomes a Reformer to propose and support, at the approach of a period of great political change, is the abolition of the punishment of death.     

       It is sufficiently clear that revenge, retaliation, atonement, expiation, are rules and motives, so far from deserving a place in any enlightened system of political life, that they are the chief sources of a prodigious class of miseries in the domestic circles of society. It is clear that however the spirit of legislation may appear to frame institutions upon more philosophical maxims, it has hitherto, in those cases which are termed criminal, done little more than palliate the spirit, by gratifying a portion of it; and afforded a compromise between that which is bests—the inflicting of no evil upon a sensitive being, without a decisively beneficial result in which he should at least participates—and that which is worst; that he should be put to torture for the amusement of those whom he may have injured, or may seem to have injured.     

       Omitting these remoter considerations, let us inquire what, DEATH is; that punishment which is applied as a measure of transgressions of indefinite shades of 

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