But without

meat and promised further reports in due course. further investigation they recommended the immediate appointment of a 'Food Council.' The Government adopted the recommendation, set up a Food Council, and discharged the Commission. Thus ended that !

This, of course, was merely a prominent example of the way in which all Governments deal with troublesome questions. The policy is based on the ingenious principle favoured by Mr. Micawber, who discharged his liabilities by the simple process of writing I O U's. Governments appoint a commission or committee and regard this as discharging their liabilities. In this case the system served its object. The Commission, after a short period of feverish activity, passed, leaving behind it a sedate, leisurely and respectable body which, so far as is discoverable, has done nothing to mitigate the high prices which so much excited the public at the last election.

The persistence by successive generations of farmers in the idea that if they are sufficiently importunate the State will adjust prices in their favour is really pathetic. Even the failure of Joseph Chamberlain did not shake their simple faith. Yet it would seem fairly obvious that in a country nine-tenths of the population of which are urban no political party will dare to commit itself to a policy involving higher food prices. To do so would be to deliver itself into the hands of its opponents and to abandon all chance of obtaining or retaining power. The only conceivable means by which any policy of adjusting or stabilising prices could be adopted without injuring the producers would be by agreement between the three parties.

The proposal that the leaders of the political parties should be invited to confer with the view of discovering whether any agreement on agricultural policy is possible was made at the last General Election, and has been from time to time revived. At a representative meeting of Oxfordshire agriculturists recently the Government was urged to try and arrange a three-party conference, and the suggestion was strongly supported by Lord Bledisloe, who has long favoured this idea

Last July in the pages of this Review 1 I ventured to point out that the grounds of difference between the parties in regard to agrarian policy have been narrowed and that three important issues on which they were sharply divided have become in principle uncontentious. Take the important subject of the public ownership of agricultural land. All three parties are committed to it in varying degrees. Conservatives have approved the acquisition, by county councils, of land for small holdings and allotments, the Liberal land policy provides for the gradual 1 'The Position and Prospects of Agriculture,' July 1928.

extension of public ownership, while the Labour Party are in favour of the immediate acquisition of the whole of the agricultural land by the State.

If it were agreed that some extension of public ownership is desirable-and the difficulties and drawbacks of private ownership in these times have been strongly insisted on by many who are in no sense politicians-it seems clear that compromise on this issue between the parties is practicable. And if on this issue, then possibly on others. In any case, is a conference not worth trying?

HENRY REW

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

LORD BUCKMASTER'S inauguration of a movement for the abolition of capital punishment in this country revives a subject upon which general opinion is divided and probably fluctuates according as the atrocity of a particular crime or the suspicion of a possible miscarriage of justice happens to be uppermost in public attention at any given moment.

In putting forward my views on this subject I am not writing as a pure theorist. I had as a young probationer for the Indian Civil Service to attend and report many criminal trials in England, and study the procedure of the courts. As an Indian civil servant for twenty-eight years my duties included a responsibility for law and order in the areas under my charge, and for fifteen years out of this period I exercised the same functions as the Home Secretary does in England in regard to petitions for mercy from those under sentence of death. During that time I have dealt with over 2000 cases of this kind, involving an even larger number of convicts. My views are therefore based upon experience gained in the discharge of grave and responsible duties.

Races differ, but the motives for crime are much the same in all countries-passion and avarice.

The advocate of the abolition of capital punishment (whom I will call the abolitionist) rests his case on one or more of four main arguments: the first two, propositions of principle; the second two, assertions of fact. First, that the sanctity of human life is so great that to take the life of a human being on any ground whatsoever is indefensible; second, that even if it were defensible as a punishment, it is not defensible merely on account of its deterrent effect upon others; third, that in any case it is a failure as a deterrent; fourth, that, having regard to the fallibility of human evidence, it is wrong to pass an irrevocable sentence and thus risk the awful responsibility of the execution of an innocent man. I will take these arguments seriatim.

In regard to the first, there will always be some conscientious objectors who are so firmly convinced of their own dogmas that they are impervious to argument, though it is doubtful whether even these would refuse to kill a man if that were the only way

of saving their own children whom the man was engaged in murdering, but, to those who are still open to argument, the correct answer seems to be that the only way of establishing the sanctity of human life among a community is to enforce the death penalty against those who wilfully violate it. It is in effect society's most effective self-defence against the crime of murder, just as much as it is an act of self-defence to fire, after due warning, upon a violent mob intent upon bloodshed and murder.

Naturally, the validity of this answer depends upon the correctness of the belief that the extreme penalty is, in fact, an effective deterrent against murder. I will come to this presently, but have to deal first with the second argument. I have heard it contended that there is a punishment which fits the crime, but if the punishment awarded is greater than this limit, in order to deter others from doing likewise, then the guilty man is being punished excessively for an extraneous reason that has nothing to do with the culpability of the particular offence that he committed. This reasoning appears to me to be quite fallacious, because it is based on the assumption that every individual crime has a punishment which is exactly apportionable to its culpability. Only an Omniscient Being could determine any such exact adjustment of punishment to culpability, and the law, being a human institution, does not attempt to do so; it fixes in all cases a maximum punishment for a particular class of offence, and leaves it to the judge to apportion such amount of the whole as he thinks will meet all the circumstances of the particular case. Punishment is not an act of revenge administered on a fixed scale-' an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth.' Its objective is the protection of society against offenders. In the case of lesser offenders, the offender is made to suffer loss of property by means of a fine; in more serious cases, loss of liberty; and, in the extreme case of murder, loss of life. The deterrent effect of the punishment on himself and others in the first two cases, and on others in the last, is the basis of the protective value to society of the punishment of offenders. The maximum punishment is the greatest that the law allows for its own protection, no matter how prevalent the offence or how heinous the offence, but within that maximum the prevalence of an offence is one important element in determining the degree of severity which the judge will think fit to impose in the particular case. When the maximum punishment allowed by law is clearly failing as a deterrent, the Legislature may, and often is asked to, increase the severity of the punishment which the law allows.

There are a few offences for which the law of England provides a minumum as well as a maximum punishment. Murder is the

only case in which the maximum and minimum are the same, and the judge is left no discretion, the sole reason being that in the eyes of the law no lesser punishment will avail to secure, as far as it is humanly possible to secure anything, a recognition by the community that human life is sacred.

I now come to the third argument, that of persons who deny that the extreme penalty is an effective deterrent. Here they have a specious support for the argument in the fact that the man who is hanged for murder was not himself deterred from committing the crime by the fact that it was punishable with death, and that other murderers have suffered the death penalty. But if this argument were pursued it would have the effect of proving that punishment has no deterrent effect at all, since the persons convicted of any crime in the calendar were, ipso facto, themselves not deterred by the law prescribing punishment for that crime. It is impossible to prove in the concrete that X., Y. or Z. would have committed murder but were deterred from doing so by the fact that A., B. and C. were punished. It is only by reasonable inferences from the observed acts and omissions of man in the average that conclusions can be formed. It will be admitted, no doubt, that if immediate execution inevitably followed the commission of murder, it would only be committed by three classes of people those who are also ready to commit suicide, those who are sighing for martyrdom, and those who are so suddenly infuriated at the time of the act that they do not stop to think at all. The first class will generally make no effort to escape; the second will most frequently do so; the third are the most uncertain. In the excitable East they sometimes proceed to run amok and kill everybody in sight, or they may, in a fit of remorse, proceed to give themselves up, or they may take refuge in flight. I have known a case in which the murderer went on to commit nine murders before he was himself killed. I can recall another in which the murderer proceeded to decapitate his victim, put the head in a basket, carried it several miles to the police station, and there deposited it as gruesome evidence in support of his confession. These three classes of cases apart, the average man who commits murder with some degree of premeditation does so, not because he is not afraid of being hanged, but because he has confidence that he will escape detection. The severity of the penalty fails as a deterrent to the criminal whenever he thinks the chances of his conviction and punishment are remote. But it is idle to deduce from his act that he does not fear death.

There are others that contend that imprisonment for life is a more terrible sentence than death, and hence that the abolition of capital punishment would have no effect in increasing the crime of murder.