the countless brood of statutes on the Game laws, and the innumerable penalties attached to acts which, at common law, were not punishable, and which had always been considered in the eye of law as indifferent. The preparation of these statutes is performed in the most slovenly and perfunctory manner. When the Government requires a smuggling law or an excise law, instructions are sent to the solicitor of the particular department of the executive, or to the person usually employed to draw acts of parliament, by whom they are hastily thrown into a sort of technical form, without the slightest consideration of the subject-matter of the enactment, and with little or no attention to the operation or connexion of their clauses.

The edition of the Statutes at Large by Tomlins and Raithby, which is the most condensed of any hitherto given to the public, forms sixteen volumes in quarto and two parts, from Magna Charta to the end of 1818: five volumes and a half of which comprise the acts from King John to the end of the reign of George II., and the remaining ten and a half are filled with those of the present reign. Since the Union with Ireland, a thick closely-printed volume has been published every two or three years, and the average number of public acts passed in each of the last eighteen years amounts to 140. At this rate of accumulation, their size at the end of the present century will have swelled to fifty of such ponderous quartos, and the number of public acts to 14,000-no inappropriate companion to the 800 or 1000 volumes of Reports which at that period are likely to compose a portion of the treasures of a lawyer's library. If any person should take the trouble to verify this statement, it will be found rather to fall below than exceed the truth, and when the surprize has ceased which it is calculated to awaken, the first question we are irresistibly impelled to ask, is, whether all this mass of legislation be indispensably necessary? If it is, it becomes our duty to submit to it with the resignation with which an inhabitant of the Alps eyes the progress of a superincumbent glacier, which he perceives year after year increasing and descending, and which he foresees must at no distant period overwhelm him. That such must be the effect of the present multiplication of laws, if suffered to continue, no reasonable man can doubt • We,' says Lord Stair, in the Dedication to his Institutions of the Law of Scotland, as it stood in his time, are not involved in the labyrinth of many and large statutes, whereof the posterior do ordinarily abrogate or derogate from the prior, that it requires a great part of a life to be prompt in all those windings, without which no man can with sincerity and confidence consult or plead, much less can the subjects, by their own industry, know where to rest, but must give more implicit faith to their judges and lawyers, than they need or ought to do to their divines.' But the necessity of such a multitude of public laws ought not to be hastily admitted. If there is any one subject on which experience, and the concurring streams of knowledge of every kind, have given us an

incontrovertible superiority over our ancestors, it is in that of legislation; and by the use of proper means, there is the strongest reason to indulge a belief that the evil complained of, if not entirely removed, might at least be greatly alleviated. Among the causes of the present size of the Statute Law; the number of those relating to the revenue; those prohibiting or encouraging importation and exportation; those which are local and temporary; those which proceed from a love of legislation; and the inaccurate and slovenly manner in which the whole body of Acts of Parliament are drawn up, may be named as the most prominent.'

We agree also with Mr. Miller, that both the size and the number of acts of Parliament owe much of their increase to the negligence and unskilfulness with which they are prepared. Take up what volume of the statutes we please, at whatever page it opens, we are overwhelmed by a heavy verbosity and tautology, by words which neither have a meaning, nor even blunder about a meaning.' but which seem to have been adopted for no other purpose than that of involving the subject of the enactment in the greatest possible confusion and perplexity. What can be more unnecessary than the everlasting iteration of he, she, and they,' person or persons,' and other absurd pleonasms, which answer no real end, and contribute neither to certainty nor clearness? In all moral reasoning upon man, the generic word man includes woman also; and why should not the language of legislation be equally comprehensive?

'As an example,' says Mr. Miller, of prolix phraseology carried to the utmost extent of which it seems susceptible, the 5 Geo. III. c. 56. for the encouragement of Statuaries and Bust-masters, may be referred to, which is the more liable to censure, as, both on account of the persons for whose benefit it was made, and because it is an amendment of a former act which it declares to have been insufficient, it might have been expected to be more than usually perspicuous. It runs in the following terms: Be it enacted, &c. that from and after the passing of this act, every person or persons who shall nake, or cause to be made, any new and original sculpture, or model, or copy, or cast of the human figure, or human figures, or of any bust or busts, or of any part or parts of the human figure clothed in drapery or otherwise, or of any animal or animals, or of any part or parts of any animal combined with the human figure, or otherwise, or of any subject being matter of invention in sculpture, as of any alto or basso relievo, representing any of the matters or things hereinbefore mentioned, or any cast from nature of the human figure, or of any part or parts of the human figure, or of any cast from nature of any animal, or of any part or parts of any animal, or of any such subject containing or representing any of the matters and things hereinbefore mentioned, whether separate or combined, shall have the sale, right,

and property of all and in every such new original sculpture, model, copy and cast of the human figure, or human figures, and of all and in every such bust or busts, and of all and in every such part or parts of the human figure, clothed in drapery or otherwise, and of all and in every such new and original sculpture, model, copy, and cast representing any animal or animals, and of all and in every such work representing any part or parts of any animal combined with the human figure or otherwise, and of all, and in every such new and original sculpture, model, copy, and cast of any subject being matter of invention in sculpture, and of all and in every such new and original sculpture, model, copy, and cast in alto or basso relievo, representing any of the matters or things hereinbefore mentioned, and of every such cast from nature, for the term of fourteen years, from first putting forth or publishing the same,' &c. Had this act simply declared, That after the passing of this act, every person who shall make or cause to be made any piece of sculpture or model being matter of invention, or any original mould or cast of any objects animate, or inanimate, or of any part or combination thereof, or who shall make any original copy of any such sculpture, model, mould, or cast, shall have the sole right and property to and in the same for the term of fourteen years from first putting forth or publishing the same,' &c. it would have been a great deal shorter, and have expressed what appears to be its meaning more distinctly. On this point, however, it is necessary to speak with caution, for in spite of the multitude of words with which it is loaded, one can hardly be certain, however often it may have been read, whether its meaning has been fully comprehended. There are no fewer than three questions which it leaves in considerable ambiguity: 1stly, whether a sculptor who invents a statue, and makes casts from it of the same size, has such casts protected against imitation for fourteen years. 2dly, whether if a sculptor or moulder makes an exact resemblance of an ancient theatre or temple, which has never been copied before, reduced to a tenth of the real size, such copy or work of invention is within the statute. And 3dly, whether it is unlawful again to reduce the copy, or only unlawful to make and vend a fraudulent fac-simile of it?' pp. 50-53.

These are great and hourly increasing evils, and unless, seasonably attended to, they will force themselves upon public attention, with an importunity which cannot be any longer evaded. But the state of our Criminal Law is a subject still more important. It has been elaborately discussed by Mr. Miller, but, we must venture to say, not in the candid and philosophical spirit of a reasoner intent upon the truth, but with the subtlety of a minute sophist, who is anxious, by unfairly wrestling with the arguments of an antagonist, to gain a paltry credit for his own.

The frequency of capital punishments in England, their indiscriminate application by the Statute Book, whether absolutely inflicted or not, and at the same time, an undiminished frequency of crimes, are facts which no man can affect to deny. To

infer, then, that there must be something wrong in our sanguinary code, something inoperative, at least, in laws the severities of which have no visible effect upon the offences against which they are denounced, is not a very extravagant inference. Non minus principi turpia sunt multa supplicia, quam medico multa funera,' is the language of Seneca: it is the suggestion also of common sense.

We reason upon this assumption,-that penal laws ought to be remedial. The existence of the evil must impeach the efficaciousness of the remedy, for it is only by the result, that a question of this nature can be determined, What Bacon applies to physical science, applies also to codes of penal jurisprudence. As religion enjoins that faith is to be tried by works, so shall systems be tried by their results, and that which is unprofitable, shall be rejected as vain and unsound; and indeed, the more so, if it produces thorns and thistles, instead of grapes and olives.' To say, therefore, of penal law, that it is remedial of certain evils, while those evils remain in undiminished force, and social life continues, in spite of enactments of the most undistinguishing severity, to be disfigured by crime, and violence, and fraud, is to pronounce its condemnation. But our penal laws are not merely inefficient as counteractive of crime: they are attended with a positive mischief. The frequent denunciation of capital punishments not necessarily followed by their infliction, hardens, instead of subduing the minds of those who are inclined to the commission of crime; while their actual infliction excites a species of public sympathy, by which hatred of the crime becomes softened into commiseration for the criminal. Thus, the laws lose their terror in the minds of the wicked, and forfeit the reverence of the good.

Let us not be misunderstood. Were the execution even of sanguinary laws followed by that diminution of crime which is the end of all punishment, we should, perhaps, have little right to complain of their severity. Society, suffering under evils that threaten its dissolution, may be authorized to sacrifice even life itself in pursuit of objects essential to its very existence. To adjust, as by a rule and compasses, a specific penalty to a specific offence, and to exact a perfect conformity of each to each in kind and degree, is wholly impossible. Our question is, Has the mischief been stopped? If the mischief continues, or augments, we gain nothing by penal severity, but an aggravation of the mischief required to be put down. The crime is still walking abroad in its adult and matured vigour: the punishment is still applied, but with no other effect than that of shocking our moral sensibilities by its severity, or hardening,

and, by hardening, deteriorating those whom it is our object to deter from crime. There is still another and a great evil, which imheres in a system of indiscriminate severity. The crime which is the subject of a punishment wholly out of proportion to its degree of turpitude, or rather, out of all fair proportion to what society suffers from its perpetration, goes unpunished; for both prosecutors and juries shrink from their duties, and the judge refuses to carry it in execution. If not, (the other form of the dilemma,) the execution of the sentence takes place and the hatred of the crime is then transferred to the severity of the law. The criminal is no longer considered as the party who has done the injustice; it is the law giver, and the minister by whose hands the law is enforced.

The late excellent and lamented Sir Samuel Romilly made an effort, worthy of the benevolence of his heart and the soundness of his judgment, to remove some of the penal anomalies which deform our statute-book. He began in 1808, by bringing in a bill for abolishing capital punishment in the case of stealing privily from the person, which passed into law. He followed this, in 1812 with three other bills, intended to abolish the punishment of death for stealing from a shop or warehouse to the amount of five shillings, from a dwelling-house to the amount of forty shillings, and from on board vessels in navigable rivers to the same amount. All these bills were rejected. He persisted, however, in his exertions down to 1817, but did not live to see the provisions of them adopted. In March 1819, a select committee was appointed to inquire into all offences rendered capital by our criminal laws. Their report, including the evidence taken before them, and the documents laid on their table was printed in November following. The recommendation of the Committee was, that certain classes of statutes which had created numerous felonies should be repealed altogether, and, in regard to others, that transportation or imprisonment should be substituted instead of death. Mr. Miller concedes the expediency of repealing many of the acts enumerated in the report. To such a degree does this enlightened candour extend, that he is disposed to give up the venerable statute of Philip and Mary making it capital for Egyptians to remain within the kingdom one month! He has subdued his nerves so far as to see no absolute danger in repealing the humane statutes which makes the being disguised within the Mint, or any injury done to Westminster bridge, capital; But the Black act, that lumber room of capital felonies, into which all sorts of offences, however dissimilar to each other in moral qualities or in mischievous tendency, are huddled together, the Black Act he will not part