Excerpt from The Punishment of Death: To Which Is Appended His Treatise on Public Responsibility and Vote His conviction on the subject treated of in the following pages was not derived from any authoritative opinion of his father, who - as appears from a private letter written in 1783, when he was twenty-six years of age, and was called to the Bar - considered that capital punish ment could not altogether be dispensed with, but who, at a later period - while death was still the penalty for stealing property of the value of one shilling - may have thought the time unsuited to a discussion whether it should remain the appropriate punishment for murder or treason. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.