ABSTRACT
The question of capital punishments appears likely to be closely associated with the question of public executions. Those persons who start with the assumption, that the end and standard of all punishments should be prevention, and that the penalty for a crime should be measured by the severity requisite to preclude the chance of its repetition, will probably find in the registers of current history a good store of arguments for proving that hanging has not hitherto prevented murder, and that spectacles of public executions have failed in producing the specific effects anticipated from their operation. The adoption of one line of argument necessarily invalidates many of the pleas collaterally advanced on the other side. Death, it must ever be remembered in conducting these discussions, is not the greatest on a list of graduated punishments, but a punishment standing alone and unapproached in its awful magnitude.
