employment for the people and adequate wages, before it punished them for being idle-such a Government would never think of making the system of workhouse prisons universal, and punishing poverty as a crime. It would make a distinction between voluntary and unavoidable pauperism-between sturdy vagrancy and the casual dependence which is the visitation of misfortune. But our government is neither wise nor just. It aggravates, by its bad measures or its neglect, the misery of the people-a misery that misgovernment has brought upon them, and then relies upon the long-disproved efficacy of exterminating laws to protect society from the consequences of its own errors, indolence, or vices!

Notice of an article in TAIT'S MAGAZINE.-July 11, 1837.

In another part of our columnst will be found an able article on the punishment of death, extracted from the July Number of Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, a periodical which, we need hardly say, differs widely from the Morning Herald on most political questions-being one of the popular organs of Scottish radicalism, conspicuous among the "northern lights" of ultra-liberal opinions. The reform of the criminal law is not, or at least ought not to be, a party or mere political question. The manner in which it speaks of our humble exertions in this cause deserves our acknowledgments. It also mentions the names of some of the celebrated men who preceded us in this great work, but from whom we differ in this respect-that they rested the question altogether on expediency; whereas we have advocated it upon religious grounds also believing, as we do, that to destroy human life according to arbitrary will and pleasure, and to save the trouble of devising some reasonable punishment, is not the right of any body of men and that princes and parliaments are not exempt from obedience to the great command, "Thou shalt do no murder."

[It is almost superfluous to say that Mr. Sydney TAYLOR was not the author of the article in TAIT'S MAGAZINE, referred to in

+ [Morning Herald.]

the preceding paragraph. As, however, in connexion with the same subject, some contributions from his pen had appeared a few years before, in that respectable Periodical, we shall here, with the kind permission of its Conductors, offer some extracts—regretting that the limits of this volume prevent the insertion of the whole. The entire articles are to be found in TAIT'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE for the months of August and November 1832.-ED.]

PUNISHMENT OF DEATH.

[Aug. 1832.] Of all the ages that have passed since our free Saxon institutions were first desolated by the tide of the Norman conquest, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but especially the latter, were more prolific of sanguinary statutes than any which had preceded them. This barbarism struck its roots deeper into the soil, and flung a deeper gloom of shadow over the land, in the ages when the magnificent genius of Milton, the severe reason of Locke, the sublime intellect of Newton, poured forth the riches of political, moral, and physical science, than when the mighty mind of Alfred, in the obscured twilight of knowledge, laid the foundations of our Constitution. Nor did any one appear to civilize the spirit of the laws when our language and manners were polished and refined by the wits and moralists, of what has been called the "Augustan age of England," which followed the more enterprising and masculine era, when Bacon broke the chains that had enslaved the human mind to the dominion, of what may be termed an intellectual barbarism; and, as was said of Plato of old, brought down philosophy from heaven to dwell with men !

One would have thought that the conquests of such genius, the acquisitions of such knowledge, would have had the effect, not only of improving the mental powers, but of giving a purer perception to the moral sense. One would have thought that they would not only have had the effect of rendering man "more mild and sociable to man," in the ordinary intercourse of society, but also of ameliorating those institutions of society which sprang up in comparatively barbarous times, and remained stationary, while the human mind was pursuing that

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career of civilization to which the Art of Printing opened the way, and for which it furnished the great impelling power. It was not so, as far as the institution of criminal justice was concerned. In proportion as every other science was cultivated and advanced, that branch of the science of government which relates to the repression and punishment of crime, seemed to retrograde and become continually more savage, and more like what Lord Bacon calls, the wild justice of revenge. In his time, Blackstone complained that, "among the variety of actions which men are daily liable to commit, no less than one hundred and sixty had been declared, by Act of Parliament, to be felonies deserving of death. The greater number of those statutes were comparatively recent; and upwards of sixty more were added to the black catalogue of capital crimes, between that time-the middle of the eighteenth century-and the beginning of the nineteenth; since when, a re-action has taken place, and reason endeavours to restore to justice her appropriate attributes, and to vindicate her outraged rights.

It is a maxim as true and as worthy of all acceptance in England, as in France, that "une loi rigoureuse produit des crimes." Those who hold the doctrine that the legislature may justify the infliction of whatever degree of severity is, or appears to be, necessary for the prevention of crime, prostrate their intellect and moral sense before a sanguinary chimera; for it is not more cruel than chimerical to confound the smallest offences with the greatest, with the hope of deterring from crime. We must be careful not to mistake the power which the legislature sometimes assumes, for the just authority which it has a right to exercise. If the exterminating code of a single Draco be odious, absurd, and impracticable, it matters not in the eye of reason or morality, that five or six hundred disciples of the Draconic system of legislation, have collectively voted a code as indiscriminate in the sanction of judicial murder; it will be equally odious, absurd, and impracticable. Laws that shock the sentiments of nature, confound the moral distinctions of guilt, and endeavour to abolish those earlier laws, which were imprinted on the human heart by that CREATIVE WISDOM that made man in his own image-are not the less

criminal because they have been enacted by a number of individuals, instead of being the work of a solitary legislator. When life, the gift of God to man, is taken unnecessarily, whether the crime be the act of one, or the joint act of many, it is the same crime still. A legal form, and the legislative solemnities by which the human sacrifice is accompanied, cannot bless the act against which the decree of the Almighty has gone forth. Such forms and ceremonies can secure the perpetrators against the temporal consequences, but cannot relieve them from the moral guilt of murder.

The right of inflicting the punishment of death at all, has been questioned and well it may;-for, when we consider that the legislature can have no powers but what it derives from society at large, and society has no other powers than what are derived from the individuals who compose it—which individuals, it is not pretended, have any power over human life-it does seem difficult to account for the legitimacy of that commission, which the legislature assumes, to destroy the life of man. But, waiving that question for the present, we may safely say that it was a deplorable error-an error the result of gross ignorance and vanity-in the legislature, to believe that it had a warrant to make what offences it pleased incur a forfeiture of life. Lamentable have been the consequences of that criminal usurpation of a boundless authority to massacre indiscriminately, under the forms of law.

So possessed had the English parliament become with the notion of its omnipotence in legislating upon crime, that it sent forth the sentence of extermination, equally against trivial violations of the rights of property, and crimes of violence and blood. To such extravagant lengths had the unaccountable appetite for the destruction of their species impelled English legislators at various times, that offences which were really nothing more than civil trespasses—and ought to have been treated as such, by compelling the offending party to make restitution, or to pay a moderate fine, or suffer a certain term of imprisonment-have been added to the fatal list of crimes punishable with death. Such, for example, are the offences of wilfully breaking down the head of a fish-pond; maliciously

throwing down, or even partially destroying the rail, chain, post, or bar of a turn-pike gate; cutting down an apple or cherry-tree in an orchard; or any ornamental tree in a garden or avenue; or any hop-binds, growing in a hop plantation; the wilful breaking of any tools used in the woollen manufactures, without the consent of the owner; the maliciously cutting or destroying any manufacture of linen cloth or yarn, when exposed to bleach or dry. There were even local acts inflicting death for particular trespasses to damage the bridges of Brentford or Blackfriars, was a clergyable felony; but to damage Westminster, London, and Putney bridges, were capital crimes.

The word damage, it need scarcely be observed, has a most vague and comprehensive signification. The act of a boy chipping a bit of stone off a balustrade, would, under any one of these statutes, subject him to the same punishment as if he murdered his father! It has been observed of some wild animals, that, once they have tasted human blood, they never relish any other food; and the English statute-book has afforded abundant evidence that the passion for enacting sanguinary laws, increases with the indulgence of it. The acts which we have alluded to, and several others, which for minor offences against property, or even for civil trespasses, pronounced the doom of extermination, were so outrageously repugnant to all proportionate notions of punishment, that, as civilization advanced, they fell into disuse: but many of them long remained on the statute-book, as a disgraceful notification to all the world, of the barbarism which our legislators dared not enforce, and with which they were reluctant to part. It was no part of their legislative creed, that laws should be so framed as not only to be capable of being obeyed, but to be deserving of being respected.

But how could the criminal code of England be entitled to respect, when it ordained that the vagrant soldier or mariner that should wander without a pass from a magistrate, should suffer death!—that the boy of fourteen years, who kept company for one month with gipsies, should suffer death; that the man or woman who was guilty of the undefined crime of heresy,