inferior punishment is not sufficient.  I consider it as a mere modification of the right of self-defence, which may as justly be exercised in deterring from attack as in repelling it."[187] And in his diary, when speaking of a death-warrant which he had just signed, he says:  “I never signed a paper with more perfect tranquillity of mind.  I felt agitation in pronouncing the sentence, but none in subscribing the warrant; I had no scruple of conscience on either occasion.”

And it seems that his position is unassailable.  The party whose interest is to be kept in view by the Legislature in imposing punishments on offences is society, the people at large, not the offender.  The main object of punishment is to deter rather than to reform; to prevent crime, not to take vengeance on the criminal.  And, if crime be more effectually prevented by moderate than by severe punishments, society has a right to demand, for its own security (as a matter of policy, not of justice), that the moderate punishment shall, on that ground, be preferred.  That punishments disproportioned in their severity to the magnitude of the offence often defeated their object was certain.  Not only had jurymen been known to confess that they had preferred violating their oaths to doing still greater violence to their consciences, by sending a man to the gallows for a deed which, in their opinion, did not deserve it, but the very persons who had been injured by thefts or forgeries were often deterred from prosecution of the guilty by the knowledge that the forfeiture of their lives must follow their conviction.  It was almost equally certain that criminals calculated beforehand on the chance of impunity which the known prevalence of these feelings afforded them.  Wherever the sympathy of the public does not go along with the law, it must, to a great extent, fail; and that the terrible frequency of sanguinary punishment had failed in all its objects, was proved by the fact that, in spite of the numerous executions which took place, crimes increased in a still greater proportion than the population.  Under the reformed system, now first inaugurated on an extensive scale, crimes have become rarer, detection and punishment more certain—­a combination of results which must be the object equally of the law-giver and the philanthropist.

It is not quite foreign to this subject to relate that, a year or two before, a mode of trial had been abolished which, though long disused, by some curious oversight had still been allowed to remain on the statute-book.  In the feudal times either the prosecutor or the prisoner, in cases of felony, had a right to claim that the cause should be decided by “wager of battle;” but it was an ordeal which, with one exception in the reign of George II., had not been mentioned for centuries.  In 1817, however, the relatives of a woman who had been murdered, being dissatisfied with the acquittal of a man who had been indicted as her murderer, sued out “an appeal