end of punishment is the prevention of crime. Death, indeed, operates this end most effectually, as respects the delinquent; but the great object of inflicting it is the force of the example on others. If this spectacle, of horror is insufficient to deter men from the commission of slight offences, what good reason can be given to persuade us that it will have this operation where the crime is more atrocious? Can we believe, that the fear of a remote and uncertain death will stop the traitor in the intoxicating moment of fancied victory over the constitution and liberties of his country? While in the proud confidence of success, he defies heaven and earth, and commits his existence to the chance of arms, that the dread of this punishment will "check his pride;" force him, like some magic -spell, to yield obedience to the laws, and abandon à course, which he persuades himself, makes a "virtue" of his "ambition?" Will it arrest the hand of the infuriate wretch, who, at a single blow, is about to gratify the strongest passion of his soul in the destruction of his deadly enemy? Will it turn aside the purpose of the secret assassin, who meditates the removal of the only obstacle to his enjoyment of wealth and honours? Will it master the strongest passions and counteract the most powerful motives, while it is too weak to prevent the indulgence of the slightest criminal inclination? If this be true, it must be confessed, that it pre-sents a paradox which will be found more difficult to solve, when we reflect that great crimes are, for the most part, committed by men, whose long

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habits of guilt have familiarized them to the idea of death; or to whom strong passions, or natural courage have rendered it, in some measure, indifferent; and that the cowardly poisoner or assassin always thinks that he has taken such precautions as will prevent any risk of discovery. The fear of death, therefore, will rarely deter from the commission of great crimes. It is, on the contrary, a remedy peculiarly inapplicable to those offences. Ambition, which usually inspires the crime of treason, soars above the fear of death; avarice, which whispers the secret murder, creeps below it; and the brutal debasement of the passion that prompts the only other crime, thus punished by our law, is proverbially blind to consequences, and regardless of obstacles that impede its gratification -threats of death will never deter men who are actuated by these passions; many of them affront it in the very commission of the offence, and therefore, readily incur the lesser risk of suffering it, in what they think the impossible event of detection. But present other consequences more directly opposed to the enjoyments which were anticipated in the commission of the crime, make those consequences permanent and certain, and then, although milder, they will be less readily risked than the momentary pang attending the loss of life: study the passions which first suggested the offence, and apply your punishment to mortify and counteract them. The ambitious man cannot bear the ordinary restraints of government-subject him to those of a prison; he could not endure the superiority of

the most dignified magistrate-force him to submit to the lowest officer of executive justice; he sought by his crimes, a superiority above all that was most respectable in society-reduce him in his punishment, to a level with the most vile and abject of mankind. If avarice suggested the murder; separate the wretch for ever from his hoard; realize the fable of antiquity; sentence him, from his place of penitence and punishment, to see his heirs rioting on his spoils; and the corroding reflection that others are innocently enjoying the fruits of his crime, will be as appropriate a punishment in practical as it was feigned to be in poetical justice. The rapacious spendthrift, robs to support his extravagance, and murders to avoid detection; he exposes his life that he may either pass it in idleness, debauchery, and sensual enjoyment, or lose it by a momentary pang-disappoint his profligate calculation; force him to live, but to live under those privations which he fears more than death; let him be reduced to the coarse diet, the hard lodging, and the incessant labor of a penitentiary.

Substitute these privations which all such offenders fear, which they have all risked their lives to avoid; substitute these, to that death which has little terror for men whose passions or depravity have forced them to plunge in guilt; and you establish a fitness in the punishment to the crime; instead of a momentary spectacle, you exhibit a lesson, that is every day renewed; and you make the very passions which caused the offence, the engines to punish it, and prevent its repetition.

Reformation is lost sight of in adopting this punishment, but ought it to be totally discarded? May not even great crimes be committed by persons, whose minds are not so corrupted, as to preclude the hope of this effect? They are, sometimes, produced by a single error. Often are the consequences of a concatenation of circumstances never likely again to occur, and are very frequently the effect of a momentary hallucination, which, though not sufficient to excuse, ought sometimes to palliate the guilt; yet the operation of these several causes, the evident gradation in the degrees of guilt which they establish, are levelled before this destructive punishment. The man who, urged by an irresistible impulse of nature, sacrifices the base seducer who has destroyed his domestic happiness; he who having been calumniated, insulted and dishonoured, at the risk of his own life takes that of the slanderer; are, in the eye of this harsh law, equally deserving of death with the vile assassin who murders for hire, or poisons for revenge; and the youth, whose weakness in the commission of a first offence, has yielded to the artful insinuations, or overbearing influence of a veteran in vice, must perish on the same scaffold with the hardened and irreclaimable instigator of his crime. It may be said, that the pardoning power is the proper remedy for this evil; but the pardoning power, in capital cases, must be exercised, if at all, without loss of time; without that insight into character, which the penitentiary system affords. It is therefore, necessarily liable to abuse; and there is this further

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objection to its exercise, that it leaves no alternative, between death, and entire exemption from punishment; but in every degree of crime, some punishment is necessary; the novice, if subject to no reclaiming discipline, will soon become a professor in guilt; but let the corrective be judiciously applied; and its progress will discover whether he may be again trusted in society, or whether his depravity is so rooted, as to require continued confinement.

In coming to a resolution on this solemn subject, we must not forget another principle, we have established, and I think on the soundest reasons, that other things being equal, that punishment should be preferred, which gives us the means of correcting any false judgment, to which passion, indifference, false testimony, or deceiving appearances, may have given rise. Error from these, or other causes, is sometimes inevitable, its operation is instantaneous, and its fatal effects in the punishment of death, follow without delay: but time is required for its correction; we retrace our steps with difficulty; it is mortifying to acknowledge that we have been unjust, and during the time requisite for the discovery of the truth, for its operation on our unwilling minds, for the interposition of that power, which alone can stop the execution of the law, its stroke falls, and the innocent victim dies. What would not then the jurors who convicted; the judges who condemned; the mistaken witness who testified to his guilt; what would not the whole community who saw his dying