The

The It was a dark autumn night.

The old banker was walking up and down his study and remembering how 15 years before he had given a party one autumn evening.

There had been many clever men there and there had been interesting conversations.

Among other things they had talked of capital

punishment, the majority of the guests, among whom were many journalists and intellectual men,

disapproved of the death penalty. They considered that form of punishment out of date, immoral,

and unsuitable for Christian states in the

opinion of some of them the death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment

for life I don't agree with you said their host the banker I have not tried either

the death penalty or imprisonment for life, but if one

may judge a priory, the death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for

life. Capital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.

Which executioner is the more humane?

He who kills you in a few minutes, or he who drags the life out of you, in the course

of many years.

Both are equally immoral, observed one of the guests, for they both have the same subject

to take away life.

The state is not God, it has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants

to."

Among the guests was a young lawyer, a young man of five-and-twenty.

When he was asked his opinion, he said.

...