caused great uproar; the Marquis of Wellesley, in the House of Lords, stated it was “contrary to the mild spirit of the Christian religion; for no sanction can be found under that dispensation which will warrant a government to impose disabilities and penalties upon any man on account of his religious opinions.”  Shelley, who was then only nineteen years of age, and had himself suffered from bigotry at Oxford, threw himself publicly into the controversy with great vehemence, with “a composition of great eloquence and logical exactness of reasoning, and the truths which it contains on the subject of universal toleration are now generally admitted.”  Lady Shelley, from whom I have just quoted, says that her husband’s father, “from his earliest boyhood to his latest years, whatever varieties of opinion may have marked his intellectual course, never for a moment swerved from the noble doctrine of unbounded liberty of thought and speech.  To him the rights of intellect were sacred; and all kings, teachers, or priests who sought to circumscribe the activity of discussion, and to check by force the full development of the reasoning powers, he regarded as enemies to the independence of man, who did their utmost to destroy the spiritual essence of our being.”

To Shelley’s able advocacy, and to his appeals against the stamping out of political and social truths opposed to custom, particularly the celebrated letter to Lord Ellenborough, it cannot be denied that the toleration now enjoyed in Great Britain owes much.

Shelley was one of those who most earnestly deprecated punishment by death.  In his early years, if a man stole a sheep, or shot a hare, committed forgery or larceny, was a recusant catholic or a wizard, there was, on his conviction, but one penalty meted out—­death.  To Shelley’s sensitive nature, this painted and tinged everything around him with an aspect of blood.  In one of his political pamphlets, summoning all his energies, he depicts in fearful colors, the depraved example of an execution—­how it brutalized the race, and how it was the duty of man not to commit murder on his fellow-man, in the name of the laws.  The abolition of the first of these, he stated that reformers should propose on the eve of a great political change.  He considered that the punishment by death harbored revenge and retaliation, which legislation should be the means of eradicating, and he urged that

“Governments which derive their institutions from the existence of circumstances of barbarism and violence, with some rare exceptions, perhaps, are bloody in proportion as they are despotic, and form the manners of their subjects to a sympathy with their own spirit.”

In England, as in many other countries, capital punishment is now only employed on conviction of murder or high treason.  In Spain and Italy it was totally abolished, on the foundation of their young republics.  Thus have the labors of Shelley, and other reformers for the good of humanity, aided to extinguish crime made law.