for the sake of our common Father, stop!  By reopening the slave-trade, you revive the vilest crimes, and, for every negro ultimately sold to you on the coast, you cause the murder of at least ten in the interior, not to speak of those that are coolly massacred in the barracoon, when no demand exists,”—­the satisfactory reply is:  “We have nothing to do with all that; we do not travel beyond the record.  We buy the negro who is a slave; what made him a slave we do not care to know.  The pearl in the market does not show the toil of the fisher.”  And so the Fijian would properly reply:  “Do not mix up different subjects.  I rescue my departed brother from ignominious decay, and remake a man of him.  How he came to depart,—­that belongs to quite a different chapter.”

This utilitarian view acquires a still greater importance when applied to criminals under sentence of capital punishment.  Soon after Beccaria, it was asked, if we mistake not, by Voltaire:  “Of what use is the dead body of a criminal?  You cannot restore the victim to life by the execution of the murderer.”  And many pardons in America have been granted on the assumption that no satisfactory answer could be given to the philosophical question:  “What use can the swinging body of the poor creature be to any one?” The Fijian alone has a perfectly satisfactory reply.

The missionaries, already named in this paper, give a long account of the execution of a supposed Fijian conspirator, which ends with these words:  “At last he was brought down to the ground by a club; after which he was eaten.”

We can discern many advantages to be derived from the introduction of what we will call “pates penitentiaires.”

There would be no waste of food.

The sentence of the judge would sound more civilized; for, instead of hearing the odious words, “You shall be hanged by the neck until you are dead,” words would be pronounced somewhat like these:  “You shall be taken to Delmonico, and there and by him be served up on such a day, as scelerat en papillotes.”

There would be a greater readiness in jurors to convict interesting criminals, who now-a-days cannot be found guilty,—­especially were a law passed that the jury should have the criminal.  We read in the “Scottish Criminal Trials,” that a woman, clearly convicted of an atrocious murder, was, nevertheless, found not guilty.  The astonished lord justiciary asked the foreman, how it was possible to find the prisoner not guilty, with such overwhelming evidence, and was answered:  “Becaase, my laird, she is purty.”  Would not the delicacy of the prisoner have been an additional reason for finding her guilty with Fijian jurors?