then shot down his victim, emptying his weapon into the prostrate form.

As may be readily imagined, the most intense feeling of hostility against the murderer resulted throughout the community in which both men had lived for many years, as had their forebears. The innate sense of justice of these good people simply demanded that the murderer pay with his own life for that of his victim.

To commute the death penalty under such circumstances as these would have disrupted and demoralized the entire countryside. The people would have felt thoroughly justified in taking vengeance into their own hands, and there was grave likelihood that a family feud might grow out of this single crime in which a string of other killings might be the result.

Capital punishment, I am forced to believe in the light of reality, is at times a necessity. Call it a regrettable one, if you will, but nevertheless there are times when it seems unavoidable and inevitable. The idea of capital punishment is of great antiquity, and formed a part of the primal concepts of the human race. Originally the theory of punishment was vindictive, pure and simple, and oftentimes the victim's nearest of kin was authorized, in the judgment of primitive society, in taking the life of the murderer.

Later the aim of punishment developed to include the deterring of others from the commission of crimes, and up until quite recent times savage spectacles of public execution were regarded not only as justifiable but as right, and of the greatest importance. What was then regarded as necessary and exemplary is now considered harmful and barbaric.

In the days of the Roman Republic the law of the Twelve Tablets prescribed that the murderer of a parent should be beaten until he bled, tied in a sack in company with an ape, a viper, a dog, and a cock, and cast into the sea. For offenses deemed capital the Jews satisfied their sense of justice by the extremely cruel practice of stoning to death, and less than a half-century ago here in our own United States it was no uncommon sight to see the lifeless form of a horse-thief or train-robber dangling from a convenient tree.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were more than two hundred crimes punishable by death in civilized European nations. A veritable orgy of public executions and torture prevailed. Society, at that time, had not learned the lesson that savagery begets savagerynor that excessive punishment is wrong in principle.

The power of suggestion, alone, disproved this theory, and a veritable carnival of crime frequently followed on the heels of notable public executions. Little children who had witnessed them often tortured and killed their pet animals, and even inflicted cruelties on one another.

If the penal laws of the past teach us anything, they teach us that crime cannot be checked by severity alone. Modern law-enforcement seeks the reformation of the criminal for his own good as well as for the welfare of society. In punishing the wrong-doer, governments can rightfully have but two ends in view: prevention of the individual from repeating his offense and deterring others from following in his steps. Governments are authorized to inflict penalties in order to prevent evils rather than for the purpose of punishing guilt.

Theoretically, society has no right to take life for life. Capital punishment is a remnant of barbarity that must surely disappear from the earth with the progress of civilization, just as the knout, the pillory, and the burnings in oil have disappeared. In our present state of development it is no longer an abstract question of whether capital punishment is right, but whether the abolition of capital punishment is practicable.

We have reached the stage where executions are conducted as privately as possible and as mercifully. Only three classes of homicide are visited with the death penalty: deliberate intention to kill, when the killing is preceded by or accompanied with some grave crime, and when reckless disregard of innocent human beings is shown, such as train-wrecking or bombthrowing.

Even such crimes as these do not invariably result in the payment of the supreme price. I recall an instance in point which took place during my administration. It was one of the comparatively few

occasions when I commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment.

Two young boys, one eighteen, the other nineteen, were found guilty of murder in the first degree for the killing of a storekeeper in a small town in central Arkansas. They had planned to rob the store, and had gone to it armed, with the deliberate intention of theft.

The storekeeper resisted their attempts, and in the struggle which ensued he was shot and killed. The jury which found the two youthful culprits guilty of murder in the first degree had recommended mercy on account of their youth and certain other extenuating circumstances, such as their ignorance, poverty, and general lack of advantages.

At that time, however, it was not legal in Arkansas to recommend clemency to the court in cases where persons were found guilty of first-degree murder, as the death penalty was the only sentence provided by the State laws. So the jury's plea for mercy was stricken from the verdict.

Taking all these facts into consideration, I exercised my powers of office to change the death penalty to life imprisonment, as the jurors had felt prompted to do. In this manner the two condemned youths were given an opportunity to reform. I have never regretted this decision, and I am glad to add that since that time the Arkansas statutes have been amended to permit juries to fix the punishment at life terms in the penitentiary when they deem fit in cases of murder in the first degree.

Theorize as we will, however, regarding the abolition of capital punishment, there are certain types of cold-blooded, heinous crimes against which society, as a whole, demands the death penalty. I remember three such crimes during my administration when I refused to commute the death

sentences.

Two were almost identical. They occurred in rural communities and were of an extremely primitive type. The murderers were young men who had wronged trusting young girls under promises of marriage. In order to get them out of the way when exposure of their misdeeds became imminent, they had lured their vic

tims to lonely spots, brutally murdered them, cut up their bodies and disposed of them.

In the third instance the young man was infatuated with a beautiful, charming girl who did not share his emotion. His frequent proposals of marriage were refused, and finally the girl and her parents became alarmed over the unwelcome lover's forced attentions and the persistency of his advances. He was asked not to call again at their home. After a period of time he presented himself at their door and announced that he was going away for good and had called for the purpose of saying good-by.

He was admitted to the living-room where the members of the family were seated, and a general conversation took place. When he was leaving he asked the girl if she would accompany him to the door. She readily complied, and a moment later the parents were startled by the report of a pistol-shot. They rushed to the hall to find the young man standing with a smoking gun in his hand.

Their daughter was shot through the heart, and died in a few moments in her mother's arms. This was his answer to her last refusal to become his wife.

Murders such as these make one realize to the full that for certain crimes no legal punishment other than death to the perpetrator can satisfy the popular sense of retribution. To frustrate this instinct must result in the summary justice of lynching, which instead of furnishing any social protection becomes a great moral danger, and leads to the taking of the lives of innocent people.

No human official can measure the strength of inherited tendency toward any act, whether it be of a criminal character or not. The intellectual and moral training of the individual, the community, and the age in general, the force of temptation, the circumstances and environment, all play an important part in the degree of criminality. These make it a fact that one person might commit murder with less moral guilt than another might commit a theft.

The State is the sum total of the will of the people, and must allot to each lawbreaker a punishment suited to his wrongdoing and his individual nature. This

punishment should be adjusted to the person rather than to his crime.

To-day we recognize the fact that there are degrees of guilt in the taking of another's life. Crimes that are committed under circumstances of great excitement, sudden provocation, or passion do not call for the extreme penalty now.

Most of us admit that the death penalty does not tend to diminish capital crimes. Like the birth and the death rates, they seem to vary but slightly. Observation of cases of crime shows us that the thought of the punishment is either not present at all when a violent act is committed, or it is overwhelmed by a conviction of the certainty of escape.

No, the taking of life does not prevent murders. Like war, capital punishment may be classed as a remnant of barbarism. Which brings me back to my first conclusion about capital punishment: that we have not yet reached that happy time when it may be safely and definitely written out of the laws of the land.

There occurs to me another outstanding occasion from my own experience in support of this conviction. At the time I was acting as circuit judge, an office I held for seven years prior to the governorship. The case was that of the State against a negro woman, charged with the murder of a white man, a deputy sheriff. The woman was a disreputable character of the criminal class. The officer was respected and well liked. He was survived by a young wife and two small children. He was shot down by the woman as he attempted to place her under arrest.

The most intense animosity prevailed throughout the white population of the community against the murderess, which any one at all familiar with the South and the negro problem can readily understand. She was found guilty of murder in the first degree, and although I had never before sentenced a woman to electrocution, I did so at this time. My motives were to save her from the gibbet, which would, undoubtedly, have been her fate at the hands of the mob if the death penalty had not been pronounced, and the possible prevention of a race riot with the attendant shedding of innocent blood. Later, her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and Arkansas still retains her

untarnished record of never having executed a woman.

One of the South's most serious problems is the negro question. The legal system is exactly the same for both white and black, although the latter race is still quite primitive, and in general culture and advancement in a childish stage of progress.

If the death penalty were to be removed from our statute-books, the tendency to commit deeds of violence would be heightened owing to this negro problem. The greater number of the race do not maintain the same ideals as the whites. They have their own particular way of looking at life.

The sometimes unexplainable fiendish crimes of low-grade types of negroes arouse uncontrollable excitement on the part of the white population, which is followed by disgraceful burnings and lynchings. Due process of law and orderly carrying out of the calm administration of justice are eliminated. I trust that my readers do not get the false impression that the South is a land of lawlessness and disregard of established codes of justice. Every section of our land has its own individual problems. The South to a great extent enjoys immunity from the gangs of professional criminals with their hired gunmen that frequent the larger cities of the North and East.

Furthermore, the great cities with their towering structures of steel and their hemmed-in spaces, containing thick centres of population, are no places for lynchings and commissions of extra-legal punishments by mobs. As a matter of fact these crude deeds of retribution outside the law take place largely in smaller communities of the agricultural character.

I am by no means condoning in any way these mob tactics. On the contrary, I deplore them deeply, and note with satisfaction their obliteration with the gradual readjustment of conditions in the South since reconstruction and the proper administration of justice. At present these cases are tried in court, just like others, and the death penalty is assigned. But it is plainly evident that if capital punishment were abolished and the blood-curdling assaults were unpunishable by death, mob violence would be supreme.

One of the strongest forces in the world is custom. Convention is a powerful element. Society is founded on these and there it rests. Let a man try to break through these and, honest though he be, the finger of scorn marks him out from his fellows. He is branded as an outcast and a rebel. The shafts of ridicule are directed against him. Devious and rugged are the paths he must tread. Your true, sincere reformer-not the paid hireling-is ever a martyr. Not until long after his own time in a subsequent age is his real worth discovered and the crown of honor and glory placed upon his brow.

In a similar manner the changes and reformations wrought are the results of painful struggle and exhausting toil. The change in social usage and manners creeps gradually but steadily on to a brighter day of promise. The heresy of yesterday becomes the creed of to-morrow.

In conclusion let me reiterate my views on capital punishment. Theoretically, it might well be abolished, not only for the sake of the reformation of the individual but also for the advancement of society. But practically, in our times and with the

conditions of our social structure as it is, it would not be wise or safe to write capital punishment out of the law.

I believe that the time will come when society will be developed along the lines of Christian ethics, when it will be ready completely to abolish the severe death penalty.

The burnings by fire and oil, the crucifixions, and similar cruel torments are gone. Men now devise death by law in the mildest form possible. One notes the air of privacy that attends the execution. The prison officials, the minister of religion, a few newspapermen are the only attendants. The penalty is carried out as privately as it can be done and at the same time fulfil the requirements of legal procedure.

All this shows the trend of things. Gradually the barbarities of cruder ages have been eliminated. Gradually the whole business of capital punishment has been mitigated and softened. It is quite difficult now to empanel a jury which will affix the death sentence on a prisoner.

Some time in the future the day will dawn when capital punishment through the steady growth of society will be completely a thing of the past.

M

ANY Americans visit Scotland again and again for the purpose of playing and admiring the superb golfcourses there, without inquiring much into their interesting history. Most of them, it would seem, have the impression that the royal and ancient game was, in the olden time, the pastime of the aristocrats. In any case, without having given much thought to the matter, that was my own opinion, and I was not a little surprised, last summer while in Scotland, to read in some of the earlier books on golf that this delightful game has always been the most democratic of sports. Indeed, the very course upon which I was playing at the time was public property. Common land by the sea is usually called the links; and all of the historic courses such as Leith, Bruntsfield, Musselburgh, Blackheath, and St. Andrews-were laid out on community

land.

The best players have usually been artisans. Many of us have heard of Patersone, the shoemaker, whom the Duke of York, afterward James II, chose as his partner when he contended with his English rivals. Golf in earlier centuries seems to have been the favorite sport of the common and meaner sort of people" wherever they had easy access to the links. History is very uncertain as to the origin of the game. There are those who are convinced that it was imported from Holland, and it is not unreasonable to believe that the Scottish sportsmen of property and position may have brought balls and clubs from Holland and adapted the Dutch game of Kolf to the links of their native land. In any case, it has been the game of the common for centuries and the chief pastime of the people residing near such public ground.

Wherever golf has been played it has

taken possession of the field. In 1457 the Scottish Parliament enacted laws against it because the people were practising golf instead of archery-at that time a very necessary art in the struggle of the Scotch against the English. Later the Puritans assailed golf because the people played on the Sabbath in the time of "Sermonses." There were indeed so many arrests made and so much interference placed in the way of sportsmen by the "unco guid that King James issued in 1618 a solemn "Declaration to His Subjects Concerning Lawful Sports to Be Used." He protested against the prohibition "which barreth the common and meaner sort of people from using such exercises as make their bodies able for warre .. and in place thereof sets up filthy tiplings and drunkenesse, and breeds a number of idle and discontented speaches in their alehouses. For when shall the common people have leave to exercise, if not upon the Sundayes and holydayes, seeing they must apply their labour and winne their living in all working dayes?"

The annals of the poor are seldom written and we have therefore no history of the game before the days when royalty became interested and "noblemen, judges, and other gentlemen of position and fortune" began to form golf-clubs. Although all these gentlemen played on commons they adopted some very high-sounding names for their associations. The titles and dates of origin are as follows: The Royal Blackheath Golf Club. The Edinburgh Burgess Golf Club. The Honorable the Edinburgh Company of Golfers..

The Royal Musselburgh Golf Club.

The Royal and Ancient Golf Club.

...1608 1735

1744

1754

1774

The Royal and Ancient still plays on links belonging to the town of St. Andrews and it was not until 1892 that The Honorable Company built their fine clubhouse and laid out their private course at Muirfield.