man. No long interval weakens the impression, no long
space holds out the vague prospect of repentance and amendment, and
compensatory acts of goodness; but if he will lift the knife, if he
will mingle the poison, there is the earthly executioner at hand to
transfer him to the still more dreadful sentence of the after-world! The
same opinion which condemns the crime of murder here on earth, as the
most atrocious that can be committed, follows him to that other
tribunal; and all that his imagination has been accustomed to depict of
the horrors of internal and eternal punishment, rushes at once upon him.

When the temptation comes in the shape of sudden anger and impetuous
passion, there is a threat as sudden to encounter it. When the crime is
revolved in the secret and guilty recesses of the mind--as when some
individual stands between the tempted man and the possession of a
fortune, or some other great object of desire--there is religious terror
as stealthy, as secret, as unconquerable, as the strongest desire that
takes possession of the human heart, to assist always at his
deliberations.

M. Zschokke's little treatise, to which we have alluded, contains the
usual, together with some unusual, arguments against the punishment of
death, and contributes also a novel substitute for it. He begins, in
true German manner, by explaining (_inter alia_) the difference between
reason and understanding; the exact distinction between man and the rest
of the animal creation; and some other metaphysical generalities, which,
fortunately, are not concerned with the business in hand. For, as no two
writers agree in their explanations, and as none succeeds in perfectly
satisfying either his reader or himself, it would be impossible, if such
preliminaries were first to be adjusted, ever to arrive at the
discussion itself. The work is written in letters, addressed to a young
prince; and, at the thirteenth letter--there are but sixteen in the
whole--he approaches his main question--"Nun denn es sei zur sache!"
"Now then to the matter." And first he protests that death is no
punishment at all. The venerable historian absolutely flies to such
aphorisms as were the delight of Seneca, to prove that death is no evil,
and can consequently be no punishment; although there are some who,
under the dominion of mere instinct, may deem it such. "The death," he
writes, "of the criminal is no punishment; but for him, as for every
other mortal, only the