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Mint to be coined through the medium of the Bank, which had in fact regulated the price of that metal in the market. In consequence of the control which it was enabled to exercise, it appeared that while the price of gold ought only to have been L. 3, 15s. per ounce, in 1816, by the state of the exchanges it was kept up at L. 3: 18: 6 by the purchases of the Bank at that rate. The Bank thus had it in its power to reduce gold to a price below the Mint-price of L. 3: 17: 10 per ounce; or to raise it above the latter rate, by contracting or extending the circulation of its notes. If, by contracting its issues, it reduced the price of gold to L. 3, 16s. or L. 3, 17s. per ounce, the public would then have its remedy, by carrying gold to the Mint to be coined. Thus the evil contemplated would remedy itself. The clause in question was supposed to be necessary, as the Bank was thought to have acted on the principle of accumulating too much treasure.

The amendment was then agreed to, and the bill read a third time and passed.

On the 25th, Mr Peel called the attention of the House of Commons to the amendment of the Lords to the bill for regulating the period at which cash payments shall be resumed by the Bank of England. He referred to the resolution proposed during the late debate upon the measure by Mr Ellice; and observed, that the amendment of the Lords, altering the

date from May 1. 1821 to May 1. 1822, was in accordance with that honourable gentleman's suggestion. He therefore moved that the House do concur in it.

Mr Ellice did not object to the amendment. He still adhered to his original opinion upon this great sub. ject, and for the reasons he had previously stated. His wish had been to enable the Bank imperceptibly to withdraw from circulation their notes for one and two pounds, and the amendment of the Lords certainly recognised the correctness of the principle. The clause he had offered was also intended to provide against a difficulty that might arise from an undue contraction of the paper circulating medium by the Bank, and an unusual influx of specie into the country below the price at which the Bank was to take up its notes. Such a state of things would undoubtedly produce embarrassment, because gold in bars was not a legal tender private individuals must take their bullion to the Mint; and when it was 'coined, by an act of the present session it must be sent to the Bank. Besides, the Bank was not compelled to receive the ingots, though the public was obliged to receive them from the Bank.

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After a few words from Mr Manning, Mr Peel in explanation, and Mr J. P. Grant, the amendment was put and carried, and the bill, thus amended, finally passed into a law.

CHAPTER V.

STATE OF THE CRIMINAL LAW.

General Observations.-Petition of the Common Council praying for a revi sion of the Penal Code.-Sir J. Mackintosh moves for returns of Forgeries on the Bank of England.-Petition of the Society of Friends.-Mr Bennet's motion relative to the Transportation of Convicts, and the State of the Colony of New South Wales.-Lord Sidmouth's motion for a Committee to consider the returns relative to the existing state of Prisons and Crimes.— Motion of Lord Castlereagh on the State of Prisons. Sir J. Mackintosh's motion for the appointment of a Select Committee to consider so much of the Criminal Law as ordains Capital Punishment, carried against Ministers.Report of the Committee ordered to be received.

BECCARIA'S Treatise on Crimes and Punishments was the first work which tended, in any degree, to open the eyes of the world to the errors and absurdities contained in most of the modern Codes of Criminal Jurisprudence, and to disseminate those humane and just principles which may be aptly enough described as constituting the Philosophy of Punishment. The effects produced by this powerful performance, to which Voltaire did not disdain to act as commentator, were great and striking. Mankind, who had formerly acquiesced in the soundness of the existing laws and practice in reference to crimes and punishments, merely because they had examined neither the principles of the one nor the results of the other, were suddenly roused, by the development of truths as new as they were irresistible; and from that period we may date the commencement of a new era in the sentiments and opinions of mankind on this important and interesting subject. It was re

served for Mr Bentham, however, in his admirable work, entitled, "Théorie des Peines et des Recompenses," to systematise the principles which Beccaria had laid down, and to point out their striking applicability to the two great objects contemplated by all Penal Codes, the Prevention and the Punishment of Crimes. The lights thus struck out could not fail, in an enlightened age, and in a Government like ours, the popular part of which must always, more or less, be the index of the state of general sentiment and knowledge, to open the eyes of our legislators to the errors and defects which ignorance and negligence, rather than a sanguinary spirit, had contributed to produce, or suffered to accumulate, in our Criminal Code.

This state of the public mind naturally led to inquiry and examina tion, the results of which established, beyond the possibility of controversy, that as the severity of the law had increased, crimes had multiplied in an equal proportion, and that, to

use the language of an ingenious writer," its efficacy is frequently in the inverse ratio of its severity." (Edinburgh Review, xxxv. 321.) A few well-authenticated facts will place this important truth in a more convincing point of view than the most ingenious or profound theoretical reasoning.

Before the period of which we are now speaking (1819), the Statute Law of England contained no less than two hundred capital felonies, although, for the seventy years immediately preceding, execution had been enforced on only twenty-five of that immense number. The effects of such an anomaly hardly required to be told. In the first place, we have precisely the same punishment denounced against two hundred offences, each different, in the degree and description of criminality which it implies, from all the rest; so different, indeed, that the punishment which the law had justly decreed for treason, murder, and arson, was also denounced against being disguised on a high road, open heath, common, or down, robbing warrens,-taking fish out of a river, or breaking down the head or mound of a fish-pond. In the second place, the chances of escape were so greatly increased, that criminals, led unavoidably to calculate the hazards of punishment, were naturally prompted to engage in that most fatal species of gambling which such a state of the law could not possibly fail to create. In the last place, the enactments of the law, and the sentiments of the community, which alone can give these enactments a preventive force, were completely at variance; while the punishment of death, in cases where it was inflicted, necessarily lost a great portion of that salutary terror and indelible infamy which, but for this monstrous disproportion

between crime and punishment, could not have failed to accompany it.

But this is not all. The effects of the law, as it formerly stood, were directly and positively pernicious; inasmuch as jurymen were led to tamper with their oaths, judges to wink at what has been called a pious fraud, and counsel to lend their aid to find out, ingenious pretences, by which a salvo might be provided for conscience, while a sanguinary and disproportionate punishment was evaded. This was exemplified before the repeal of the capital part of the punishment for stealing privately in a shop to the amount of 5s. ; in a dwelling-house to the amount of 40s. ; and from vessels in a navigable river to the amount of 40s.: in these cases, it was the practice of the jury to find the value of the goods stolen below that for which the punishment of death was awarded, although, in several instances, the real value was five times greater. But to put the thing in a stronger light, let us have recourse to figures. From 1805 to 1817, a period of twelve years, 655 had been indicted for stealing privately in a shop, warehouse, &c. to the amount of 5s. Of these 113 had been capitally convicted, and not one executed! Again, in the course of the nine years immediately prior to 1817, no less than 1228 indivi duals had been tried for stealing within a dwelling-house to the amount of 40s. Of these 342 had been capitally convicted, and only one, whose case was accompanied with aggra vated circumstances, executed! Is this a state of the law which any man could desire to be continued? Once more, Mr Basil Montague stated to the Committee, appointed on Sir James Mackintosh's motion, that from the year 1732, when embezzlement of property by a bankrupt was made a capital offence, nearly 40,000

bankruptics had taken place; while in that long period there had only been 10 prosecutions, and 3 executions for the capital offence; " and yet fraudulent bankruptcies have become so common as almost to be supposed to have lost the nature of crime."

These facts speak for themselves; but if we concluded from thence that we had a fair view of all the crimes committed, and to which this almost universal impunity was extended, in the very face of the law, which, with out qualification, denounces the punishment of death on all, we should greatly err; for one of the best established and most natural consequences of a law of excessive and disproportionate severity is to create not merely a wish in the judge, counsel, and jury, to save the criminal, who has been actually prosecuted, but likewise a strong disinclination in the public to prosecute. Many persons in respectable lines of life, who had suffered from depredations of the kind above alluded to, declared to the Committee, that they could never bring their minds to prosecute where the delinquent would have been exposed to a capital conviction, and perhaps to suffer death; where as, had the punishment been less severe, and more commensurate with the offence, they would have readily prosecuted, as they had suffered severely from such depredations. Here, then, the law creates, if we may so express it, a double impunity. It indisposes the sufferer to prosecute, in which case the delinquent wholly escapes, emboldened to renew his practices, calculating on the same humanity; and, even when he is indicted, it gives him all the benefit of that "amiable conspiracy" between the Judge, the Jury, and the Counsel, by which they try to save an unhappy wretch from an incommensurate

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punishment. Hence the number of the persons indicted and tried by no means affords a just view of that par ticular department of crime; since, if we knew the number, we ought to add all those who had entirely es caped by the humane disinclination to prosecute, produced by the law, and to which we have already alluded.

We think it is hardly possible to imagine a system of Criminal Juris prudence, that calls more loudly for reform than that which produces such appalling results; which not only ensures, in a vast majority of instances, impunity to the offender, but actually gives, as it were, a species of bounty on the commission of crime. It were surely better that we had no law at all than to have a law which is never, or almost never en forced, and which is not merely inoperative as a check to crime, but leads judges and jury, in order to avoid its sanguinary enactments, to wink at a species of jesuitism, highly prejudicial both to judicial and moral purity. It is absurd to say that the dread of a fate, which is seldom or never awarded, should operate on the minds of crimi nals as a preventive, and induce them to discontinue their practices. The probability of punishment is so small, that, taken in conjunction with that natural confidence which every man has in his own good fortune, it is impossible that it should produce any other result than additional boldness in crime, accompanied with contempt for the law; for, to be at once formidable, efficient, and respected, the law should be certain. No proposition, therefore, can be truer than that of an honourable and learned member, who took a promi nent share in the discussions which are to follow; that, in its letter, no Penal Code is more sanguinary than that of England,—in administration,

none is milder or more humane. To this mildness or humanity, we of course do not object: we would preserve both, but we would not do so at the frightful expence of forcing juries to commit perjury, judges to sanction it, and of ensuring the regular and progressive increase of crime, which a little wisdom and vigour might so effectually repress.

It has been said, that our Criminal Law is the growth of a barbarous age, and therefore but ill adapted to the improved, or at least altered, condition of modern society and manners; and were the assertion true, it would no doubt furnish a reason for endeavouring to accommodate our Criminal Jurisprudence to a state of things essentially different from that for which it had been originally designed. But strange as it may appear, it was incontestably shown by Mr Buxton, that the great mass of capital felonies by which our statute-book is filled and disgraced, is of comparatively modern origin. From the reign of Edward III. to that of Henry VII. a period of one hundred and fifty years, only six offences were declared capital in addition to those already declared so by the statute law at the commencement of King Edward's reign: under the Tudors only sixteen; under the Stuarts, only thirty and under the Princes of the House of Brunswick, up to the present time, one hundred and fifty-six ! So that the enormous increase of criminal statutes took place only in the course of the last century; and the proposed reform in the Penal Code, so far from running counter to the ancient law, contemplates only the restoration of our jurisprudence to something of that purity and simplicity which it seems to have attained even in the days of our unlettered forefathers.

In the course of this chapter, the reader will find, that the proposed reform is at once moderate, practicable, and reasonable; that it proceeds upon no theoretical views in opposition to facts and experience; that the expediency of it has been admitted by men most conversant with the administration of Criminal Law; that the necessity of the punishment of death, in all cases where the voice of society demands it, and where it is necessary for the effectual protection of either life or property, is readily and fully admitted; and that the unprecedented increase of crimes in late years, and the manifest insufficiency of the existing law to check or repress them, render it a duty which the Legislature owed to the public to take measures to remedy the evil, and to restore the law to something of its ancient vigorous and healthful efficacy. With these observations, which are necessarily of a general character, because we would not anticipate any thing that was to follow, we proceed to lay before our readers an outline of the debates and discussions on this most important subject.

During this session, the attention of Parliament was first called to the state of Criminal Law by a Petition from the Common Council of London, presented to the House of Commons, on the 25th of January; and by another, of the same tenor, and from the same body, to the Lords, on the 27th, praying for a revision of the Penal Code, upon the grounds of the useless multiplication of offences punishable with death,—the effects of such a state of the laws on prosecutors, judges and jurymen, and the late unprecedented increase of crimes, notwithstanding the severity of punishment denounced by our existing Criminal Code. In presenting this petition to the Upper House, Lords

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