present day." With laws so rigid and unbending, enforced by penalties so barbarous and cruel, he does not hesitate to say that "The Code of Moses was scarcely less sanguinary than that which the Athenian legislator was said to have written in blood!"
This is a formidable indictment, and yet it must be confessed that there is a pretty strong presumption of severity in the number of capital crimes. In America the penalty of death is rarely inflicted except for wilful, deliberate murder. Other offences — such as arson and highway robbery — have been, and in some states still are, capital: but the number has been gradually diminished, till in the actual administration of justice they are reduced to one, and even in that, such is the morbid feeling of juries, that a conviction is with difficulty obtained.
What then shall be thought of a code in which there were seventeen capital crimes? Could a people be said to have emerged from barbarism which could only be kept under control by such sanguinary enactments? But Great Britain was considered a civilized country two hundred years ago, and yet there were on its statute books one hundred and forty-eight offences which were punishable with death, some of which, such as poaching, we should consider as of a very petty character, hardly to be spoken of as crimes.[1] In the Hebrew laws the punishment of death was always for crimes which struck at the very foundations of society (even though in some cases our milder laws may treat them as light offences), as, for example, disobedience to parents and contempt of parental authority. This was a relic of patriarchal times. The earliest form of human govern-
- ↑ Wines's Commentaries on the Laws of the Ancient Hebrews, p. 263.
