SIR,—Your leader on this subject, with its intemperate and unfair
attack on the Home Secretary and its many confusions of thought, can hardly expect to pass without protest.
1. The Home Secretary, with his unenviable job to perform, simply did his duty.
2. Why do opponents of capital punishment invariably assume that the primary object of all punishment is to deter others from doing the like? It is nothing of the kind. The primary purpose of punishment is neither deterrence nor the reformation of the criminal, but the vindication of the law.
3. As usual with this kind of article there is mixed up with other arguments an intense dis- like for the mode of execution now employed. This, though strictly irrelevant, does call for some sympathy. It is not capital punishment as such but all this mediaeval horror of gallows and rope that exercises a morbid fascination on sections of the public with its deleterious effects, especially on children. if a dose from a hypodermic syringe and no publicity beyond a bare announcement in the press that it had been carried out, could take the place of the present gruesome business, the front pages of the Sunday and other papers would cease to affront us.—Yours faithfully, DUDLEY SYMON The Old Yard House, Ham Common, Surrey
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