CORRESPONDENCE.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 13094, 20 April 1908, Page 8

CORRESPONDENCE.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT.

to the editor or "the press."

Sir,—Will any of your humane readera join ift the great movement that we are organising over the whole civilised world to put an end to the barbarous penalty of condemning -a fel-low-creature to death? Neither burning, nor branding, nor the gibbet, nor the rack, nor the -wheel, nor the drowning pit, . diminished crime one jot. They only hardened and brutalised and demoralised men. Hanging did not diminish theft nor horse-steal-ing; how illogical it is to imagine tha-i it will put * atop to murder. Prison that murderers are far from being the worst characters under their charge, and point out that most murders are committed through passion or jealousy, or drink, and that in most oases the fear of hanging has no deterrent effect.

Pope Clement XI. put uo over the prison, house of St. "Michael at Rome that tb© only value of punishment was to make a man better, but how can a man be made better by haneing him? France has practically abolished the death penalty; in the greater part of Switzerland it. is unknown.

Our own colonies are bringing Bills before Parliament to graduate crimes, and yet upon the statute book of civilised England it still remains that if A feloniously shoots at B's hen and accidentally kills C, he is guilty of murder, and the penalty for it is to harg him by the neck until he ia dead!

Who will help us by voice, -or pen, or purse, to make the world better by gentler- means than by the hangman's rope, or the headsman's axe, oar the electrician- dreadful chair of death? —Yours, etc.-. JOSIAH OLDFIELD, President of the Society for tlie Abolition ,of Capital Punishment. 5 Hariey street, Lon_on,-W.