It has for long been a source of disquiet to the public conscience that Great Britain is among the very few western countries which find it necessary to retain the death penalty. This policy is only a continuance of a curious national tradition of ruthlessness about executions, for although England had always made a minimal use of torture, and was a pioneer in prison reform, she retained on her statute books until well into the nineteenth century more capital offences than any other civilised country. For Catholics, teaching on the morality of a death sentence is clear. As Mr Hollis points out in his admirable contribution to Messrs Paget and Silverman’s book, ‘It is certainly the teaching of the Christian religion that life is sacred, that it is God who gives life, and therefore only reasons of absolute necessity could justify the taking of life’. The Church has never condemned capital punishment as such; in practice it connived at or even demanded its use by the secular arm for heresy, sorcery, and other offences, and when the popes held temporal power it was in operation in the papal states. Catholics may, one concludes, support capital punishment if it is necessary. But is it necessary? Are there really circumstances in which the only right thing Christians can do with a fellow-citizen is to break his neck? That is the question which the Royal Commission, which recently reported, was appointed in 1949 to answer.