example, what a lamentable thing it is to see so many Christian men and women strangled on that cursed tree of the gallows, insomuch as if in a large field a man might see all the Christians that but in one year, throughout England, come to that untimely and ignominious death, if there were any spark of grace or charity in him, it would make his heart bleed for pity and compassion." This great judge, whose language and feelings are so creditable to him, and so refreshing and stimulating to his readers, then proceeds to recommend preventive justice,—the good education of youth, the avoiding of idleness in all,—the execution of good laws, and the rarely granting of pardons, pointing, in a word, at almost all that has been thought worthy of attention in the present times.

To the authorities already named, we may add those of CHILLINGWORTH, who wrote in 1610, and SAMUEL CHUDLEIGH, who wrote in 1651; but the public opinion received its greatest accession of strength in the course of the eighteenth century. In the year 1750, in consequence of an alarm excited by the increase of crimes, a Committee was appointed-by the House of Commons to examine into and consider the state of the law relating to felonies, and to report to the House their opinion as to the defects and amendments of the same law." In this Committee are to be found the names of Mr PELHAM, then prime minister, Mr PITT, afterwards Earl of Chatham, Mr G. Grenville, Mr Lyttleton, Mr C. Townshend, Sir C. Lloyd, and Sir Dudley Ryder, afterwards Chief Justice of England. These statesmen agreed upon a resolution," That it was reasonable to exchange the punishment of death for some other adequate punishment," and they concurred in thinking, “ that the increase of crime was to be attributed to negligence in the education of the poor." A bill founded on this resolution passed the Commons, but was lost in the House of Lords, but without being opposed by Lord HARDWICK or any of the great luminaries of that House. These proceedings in the Houses of Parliament would no doubt stimulate Dr JOHNSON to the discussion respecting our criminal code, which he enters into in the 114th Number of his Rambler, 28th April 1751;

and which confers the very highest honour on his memory. And although his works are in the hands of every one, we cannot refrain from laying a few sentences of this excellent Essay before our readers.

"To equal murder to robbery is to reduce robbery to murder,-to confound in

All laws

common minds the gradations of iniquity, and incite the commission of a greater crime to prevent the detection of a less. He who knows not how often rigorous laws produce total impunity, and how many crimes are concealed and forgotten, for fear of hurrying the offender to that state in which there is no repentance, has conversed very little with mankind. against wickedness are ineffectual unless some will inform, and some will prosecute: but, till we mitigate the penalty for such violations of property, information will always be hated, and prosecution dreaded. The heart of a good man cannot but recoil at the thought of punishing a slight injury with death; especially when he remembers that the thief might have procured safety by another crime, from which he was restrained only by his remaining

virtue."

There is a remarkable coincidence between the opinions of JoHNSON respecting capital punishment, and those of the Marquis of Beccaria, who followed him in the year 1767, and whose little volume made a great impression on the British public. In the interim, however, a good deal had been done by Sir WILLIAM BLACKSTONE. His Commentaries appeared in 1758 ; and, in a few words, he accounts for the very imperfect state of the criminal laws of all the countries in Europe. This, he remarks, arose "from a want of attention to permanent, uniform, and universal principles, and adopting in their stead the impetuous dictates of avarice, ambition, and revenge; from retaining the discordant political regulations which successive conquerors or factions have established in the various revolutions of government; from giving a lasting ef ficacy to sanctions that were intended to be temporary, and made (as Lord Bacon expresses it) merely on the spur of the occasion; or from, lastly, too hastily employing such as are greatly disproportionate to their end." then takes notice of some of the severities of the English law; and remarks," that these outrageous penalties are seldom inflicted as trac; but that rather aggravates the mischief,

He

field, and, at any rate, it is proper to place him before Howard; since Mr Bentham published a Fragment on Government," in 1776, which contains the germs of all his subsequent opinions, and in 1778, on occasion of the hard labour bill, he published "Observations relative to penal jurisprudence in general." In 1791, the principles of the PANOPTICON were explained in a discourse or memoir on HOUSES OF INSPECTION, and WORK-HOUSES, sent to a member of the French Legislative Assembly; and it is remarkable, that these principles were so far acted on, without acknowledgment, in the erection of the Edinburgh Bridewell; but justice was not done in this instance either to Mr Bentham or his plan, which points at almost every thing that has since been ascertained practically by HowARD, NIELD, FRY, BUXTON, and GURNEY. The whole details of this new plan were given in a work of two volumes 8vo, printed by Mr Bentham in 1781, but never published. Various other works of his are in this situation, so that it sometimes happens that his views are piliered, as it often happens that the public are made acquainted with his works in the first instance through the publications of others. All have heard of his Traités de Legislation, and his Theorie des Peines et des Recompenses; all have heard also of the author's eccentricities, but very few indeed have had industry enough to make themselves acquainted with his merits. These are infinitely greater than is commonly supposed,-greater than what many persons are able to conceive of humanity. Mr Bentham is one of the most disinterested of his species. He has employed the whole of a long life in devising plans for the good of mankind,-for the improvement of law, education, and, in general, of society. He is one of the most severe, persevering, and intrepid thinkers, that has ever appeared in any country. There is a resoluteness of intellect about him that presses straight forward in spite of all obstacles, that spares no labour, that seeks truth only, with a total disregard of popularity, or any other collateral consideration. He neither writes for fame nor favour. His originality consists chiefly in his precision; in his power of stripping his subject of every thing adventitious;

66

and in reducing every question, as it were, to its elements. A great progress may not thus appear to be made; but no man of his time has done nearly so much to dissipate prejudices, as Mr Bentham. His analysis has not only shewn us upon what principles almost every question in legislation and education hinges, but it has conferred upon us new powers of combination. In such matters, (to use his own words,) excess seems more eligible than defect. The difficulty is to invent; that done, if any thing seems superfluous, it is easy to retract.". The very errors of this author, therefore, are benefits. By exhausting all the parts of his subject, he has shewn us what are worth retaining and attending to, and what not.

Even his moral defects proceed from an excess of virtue. Accustomed to dwell on things as they should be; convinced of having pointed out not only innumerable errors, but a great variety of practical remedies, he cannot avoid expressing himself with bitterness against those persons and prejudices which stand in the way of all improvement.

What Bentham is in reasoning, HOWARD was in action; and ROMILLY, who appeared before the public about the same time, (1784,) united the science and information of the one, with the active practical rabits of the other. Howard's first publication, we believe, was in 1785; Franklin gave his testimony in favour of a softened criminal code in 1787; PASTORET produced an excellent work on Des Loix Penales in 1790; and to their names may be added those of CowPER, TURNER, CLARKSON, PARR, RoscoE, and MONTAGU, the last of whom has not only written ably himself, but brought into one focus nearly all that has been written on the subject. This gentleman (Basil Montagu) is also a most active member of a society established in 1808, for the diffusion of knowledge upon the punishment of death and the improvement of prison discipline, from which many useful Tracts have proceeded; but what, next to the alarming increase of crimes, has tended most to rouse the public attention, are the laborious investigations into the actual state of prisons commenced by HOWARD, and prosecuted so ably by NIELD, BUXTON, and GURNEY. Mr

power at every moment, by an issue of Bank paper or Exchequer bills, to affect the comforts of the poor and the fortunes of the wealthy; and there can be no doubt that the amount of suffering, which leads to crime, has thus been greatly increased. Another, and no trifling cause, we are persuaded, is to be found in the state of our jails, which, instead of being schools of reform, are, for the most part, seminaries of all sorts of vice and crime. This proceeds from want of classification and employment; but less need be said on this topic, now that the public begin to see the evil, and seem not unwilling to cure it. Another cause, closely allied to this last, will be found in our system of police. The greatest wisdom is required in the proper treatment of trivial and youthful offences. In sending young men to Bridewell for a first, and, perhaps, no very heavy misdemeanour, you ruin their character, rob them of all hope from future good behaviour, and put them too often to a school of iniquity. Another, and a prominent, cause of the increase of crimes arises out of the discrepancy, or rather opposition, between the law and the practice as to capital punishments. By the law, death is awarded for all sorts of felonies, amounting, as we have said already, to about 200; but, for a space of 70 years, executions have taken place for only 35 of these felonies, so that for the greater part of these offences no conviction has ever taken place. The opposition, however, is still more striking between the convictions and the punishments. For the seven years preceding 1810, there were 1872 persons charged with the crimes of shop-lifting and stealing in dwelling-houses, of which a considerable number were convicted, but one only executed. For the twelve years to 1817, 113 persons were capitally convicted for one felony, but not one executed. For the eight years to 1816, no less than 1097 persons were tried for another felony, 293 were capitally convicted, but not one executed. Such a state of the law is repugnant to every principle of religion, morality, or justice. It is a bounty to crime, from the number of chances of escape which it holds out to the guilty. It makes sufferers unwilling to prosecute, witnesses unwilling to tell the truth, juries unwilling to find according to the fact, and judges un

VOL. IV.

willing to enforce the law. It brings the law, in a word, into contempt, because it cannot be executed. It makes legal proceedings a mockery; for all parties to a trial now, that the fate of the criminal will not depend on the offence for which he is tried, but on other circumstances which are to be gathered at the discretion of the judge, or others who may or may not take an interest in the fate of the criminal. It keeps a great number of persons condemned to death in suspense whether they are to suffer it or not, and puts the judge to the trouble of retrying the criminals, and pronouncing a new verdict, in what is called a report to the Crown. We observe that the RECORDER of London has, within these few days, justified himself against a charge of delay respecting 54 unhappy wretches, by stating, "that these reports (on tried cases) were very voluminous, and that it was necessary to enter into the particulars of every case, for the omission of even a slight matter might give the case a different turn, which might be prejudicial to the prisoners themselves." What a severe censure is this on the present state of the law !

It was our intention to point out the defects in the law of libel, in the mode of returning juries, and various other departments, and to have given a view of the reasonings of Bentham, Romilly, and various other writers; but we must postpone all this for the present. We regret still more that we cannot give an account of the experiments made in Flanders, in America, in the East Indies, and even at home, of a milder system; but, in all these instances, mild laws and regulations have tended to lessen crime and produce reformation in criminals. In the state of Philadelphia, we find, that, for the last four years and four months, under the old severe law, the number of crimes of a deep dye amounted to 126; in the same period, after the commencement of the new law, and while the punishment of death was done away, except for premeditated murder, the same classes of crimes diminished to 24. On the 20th of July 1811, Sir JAMES MACINTOSH, in a charge to the grand jury at Bombay, states, "Since my arrival here in May 1804, the punishment of death has not been inflicted in this court, and the average annual convictions, which had formerly been

сс