of the arguments put forward in favor of retaining the punishment used by the Chinese in the penal code. Not wishing to expose myself to any direct rebuff on the subject, I have not made the conditions upon which the Governor is instructed a matter of correspondence, but I have this day had some further conversation on the question with the Ministers, Wensiang and Jung June Asün.
They argued as usual that the relations of sovereign to subject, father to son, and husband to wife, require to be made eminent, and that it is to this end that leaders in rebellion, parricides, and wives guilty of the murder of their husbands, are punished by a death eminently severe. They urged that the true measure of a punishment should be its probable efficacy in deterring from crime; that, admitting the necessity of dealing punishment, the distinctions in those awarded by Chinese law do not affect the tendencies they are meant to for...
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