of her children. If it be considered that they are exposed to all the natural difficulties and trials of human nature, and with scarcely any thing of its aids and artificial strength-that in want and abject life, they are left almost to some inherent principle of good to preserve them under tempt ations, against which we, with all aid, are often not able to stand-there will be sufficient reason seen, why there must be, as the lowest part of a great society, a deplorable race, for whom the benefits of society scarce seem to exist.

At the head, are those who regularly subsist by depredation on property, knowing no other livelihood. Of the life, the condition, the numbers of these, the rest of society can know little, except what is brought to light by their intercourse with them at the bar of justice. For the first condition of the life of this people is its separation and obscurity. But so much may be said as belongs to the present purpose. We know of them then that they are numerous and powerful; that they subsist in every part of the country-in every great town, and in concentred and formidable strength in LONDONthat they are strongly associated that their skill, in places of their great resort, is matured and consummate; and their courage such as belongs to the spirit of the countrythat they are strong in united numbers, in counsel, and execution. We understand, that among this associated people of depredators there are all descriptions: those artificers of wickedness, who hold in their hands the threads of other men's crimes; the numerous bands who are given up to a profligate trade with little thought, and those great numbers who are the dupes at first of the corruption of others, till they take their own place, and willingly extend that corruption of which they have been themselves the victims.

Next to these, and intimately united with them, are those great numbers, who still hold their place in society, and yet participate in the crimes of the others; not relinquishing the rights they hold by the order of society, but deriving their benefit from the crimes of those who do. These are perhaps among the most morally corrupt of any. They furnish certainly a very important part of that

corrupt and systematic hostility, against which it is the business of the law to protect property, strengthening their hands, and continually supplying their numbers.

With all these are associated those great numbers who are known to us by their vicious life-those who derive their subsistence from their vice; and those whose indulgence of life is habitually vicious. A vast population, united to the others often in depredation-united in their habits of life, and always tending to participation in their crimes.

All may be regarded as united in one hostility to ordered society. For the laws, institutions, observances, manners, which favour the order of society, and are conceived by us as essential to our welfare, are to them unfriendly. They consider them with aversion.

Such is, in the first place, the constitution of that great class of society, amongst whom the offences against property chiefly spring up; of whom it seemed necessary to say so much, to shew that those against whom the laws must act, are, independently of the small portion of their offences that can ever come under the cognizance of justice, sub-. sisting in an absolutely depraved and corrupted state, by which they are already essentially detached from the good order of society.

But it is not possible to leave the subject without speaking also of the condition of those who, without belonging to this sort of association, commit the same offences; those who in their private connexion with the property of others, are brought into continual temptation which they have not strength to resist; and, yielding to corrupt inclination, become habitually criminal in their own life, long before they are tempted to join themselves to those who are avowedly abandoned. But they are on their way to join them. Such daily corruption of life drawing the man gradually lower and lower, opening before him new purposes of wickedness, and still pressing him forwards in a manner that can scarcely end, if it is not otherwise broken off, but in associating him irretrievably with those who are avowedly abandoned.

Such, then, are the classes which wealth produces in a country to prey

upon itself. The division of the ranks of society, which, with advancing prosperity, is continually proceeding, while it separates one portion of the community to affluence and refinement, separates another portion to indigence and abasement. The first great distinction which so early takes place, into the holders of property and those who are born to labour, must appear from the beginning to establish a natural warfare between the rights of one part of the community and the cravings of another. Yet moral institution is found sufficiently powerful, while it has power, to keep down this hostility, and to maintain the order of society; but take morality away, and there is no human power of avail to guard property against the boundless depredation that is let loose upon it.

If, now, it be considered what numerous and strong sources of corruption invade the morality of a people from great and sudden wealth,— what overpowering vice is engendered by the profuse means of indulging it, how the ancient manners, the strong bond of the people's integrity, fall away in the rapid changes of the time, how men are severally divided from the connexions which held them in restraint, and thrown into a licentious independence,-how the orders of society, so powerful in mutual control while they are connected, are continually removed from one another by wider separation,-how many are cast down into hopeless want by the fluctuations of even the most prosperous times, and last of all, how an inflamed desire of gain usurps the minds of all, and expels the virtuous spirit of contented simplicity, if all these things be considered, it will be apparent that there is cause enough in a great and overflowing prosperity, such as ours has been, to strike deep wounds into the heart of a people's morality; and it may appear that reason enough is shewn, why that spirit of lawless depredation which the very condition of society must create, if the most powerful moral causes did not hold it subdued, should at this time prevail.

Thus there seem to be plain and sufficient reasons in the nature of things, why such a people of offenders as this should be found in exist

ence in a great and wealthy country. And if the nature of the enormous Metropolis of such a country be considered, it will well appear why such a disease should rage with intense activity in that great heart of the nation; for there wealth is accumulated for depredation,-there it is set out in all accessible forms of temptation,-there the shadow of obscurity is on the path of the depredator at noon-day, and tenfold obscurity on his midnight haunts,-there the infected and fermenting mass of corruption is most heaped together, there, from all quarters of the country, a loose and floating mass of population is continually pouring in, and there the old iniquity of the place has its ancient strongholds-There the art of iniquity has its hereditary seat.

If the corruption of wealth has engendered amongst us a great vicious population,-if the restraints of morality, taken off from great numbers, let loose depredation upon property,

if the two evils, profligacy and dishonesty, are, in human nature and society, most intimately linked together, is it not apparent, that the first great question to a nation like this in considering by what means it shall provide the protection of property, is, how it shall deal with the moral corruption of its people?

It is from views such as these, of which, if our representation be imperfect and inadequate, every one, from the melancholy details of intelligence that are before the public, may easily enlarge and rectify it for himself, that it appears to us necessary to take the first step towards the examination of our Penal Law. Whatever that law may be, however it may be designed, it is on this people that its brunt will fall; and it is with the fullest consideration, therefore, of their condition, that a wise and great nation will proceed to the framing of its penal enactments.

If we go on then to the question of the law as it now stands, and ask what are the provisions it contains applicable to the case of this people of offenders-upon what principle it is prepared to deal with them-in what manner it has devised to guard property from their ever-active hostility?-It must be answered that the law deals with them-by Fear. Its terrors is what it hangs out over their

heads. It trusts to daunt their aggression, by visiting their offences with vengeance.

Nor is this to be represented or conceived of as the principle of our law-with any pre-eminence. For, though ours bears the reputation, among the nations of Europe, of a more sanguinary character, and has, perhaps, been less sparing than any other, among civilized men, of the punishment of death, yet the principle to visit offence with vengeance, and to secure society by terror, has been common to all law; and it is hard to say, that those nations who have retained to late times the wheel for the greatest malefactors, or those who have punished offences of lesser enormity with the galleys, have breathed in their public justice a more merciful spirit than our own. But such a comparison is little to the present purpose. What is of consequence to us to understand is, that the provision of our statute-book for the offences against property of every kind, is simply vindictive punishment—that all its penalties, from least to greatest imprisonment, stripes, disgraceful labour, infamous exposure, (so lately expunged,) banishment, death, have but one purpose and spirit running through them all-having for their design to repress crime by fear.

And the question is, Is this the law in which we can be contented to rest? Is this the best, the only policy which human wisdom can offer, to meet the exigencies of such a caseto repress a wide-spread corruption to subdue in a corrupted population the spirit of offence?

It does certainly seem in the outset something repugnant and shocking to natural judgment, to conceive that with one large portion of the society living under its care, the law can hold no intercourse, but that of avenging punishment. It is strange and unnatural to conceive, that it is a part of the necessary order of society, that one part must be treated as the natural enemies of the other, to be held in subjection only by a continual war. With a people! And look what these people are. They are not merely those fierce offenders, whose audacious wickedness braves the laws of men, and challenges their vengeance; who sever themselves

in defiance from human society, and proclaim against it a war of extermination. They are the lost-of all kinds; the ignorant, the unwary, the thoughtless, the seduced, the unhappy offspring of unhappy parents,-the forlorn, the famished, the victims of luxury, the slaves of sin, the reprobate in vice before they ventured upon crime,-grey-headed men, lost women, and children nursed in transgression. No doubt, they have among them those, whom, if human law may avenge, it must visit with vengeance, those hardened against their kind, who trample every thing into destruction for themselves. But these are not the majority. The greater number are those upon whom the burden of human sin has fallen, -those to whom vice and wickedness are the calamity under which they are born,-on whose heads the lees of corruption from a vast and corrupt society have dropped down,

those to whom, in the apportioning of the conditions of men, the condition of abject wretchedness has fallen.

Let it be thought, too, for what end we are to wield vengeance against them; for the defence of a privilege which we inherit in virtue of their exclusion from it; and their exclusion from which is the first cause of the evil under which they lie.

They are a people engendered by the moral corruption of the society. Then, if we know any thing, we know that it is impossible to quell them by fear. They are too many. Terror may subdue single offenders; or it may break down a heartless and broken cause. But a people strong in mutual support and sympathy, covered from the law by their multitude, and continually springing up afresh and renovated from the same corrupt source, are invincible to fear. This must be known without evidence; but there is the weightiest evidence to this point, of which we shall speak hereafter in another paper.

Their number is one reason that makes the restraint of fear impracticable with respect to them. The depravity in which they live is another.

For what is to them the terror of punishment? Do they not live in the habitual disregard of all fear? Are

they not hardened into insensibility? Have they not acquired the faculty of living upon present impulses, in blindness to the future? Is not their temper reckless and desperate? Is there any thing they have to forfeit ? Is not the heaviest penalty which Nature has annexed to punishment, for them abrogated, Shame? The whole temper and condition of their mind is disordered; and yet the law trusts to their reason. They have thrown away what was indeed dear to them; and the law threatens to take what is left. It scourges those whose condition has been bodily suffering. It banishes those who have neither home nor country. It puts those to death who are sick of life.

Of a people living in moral corruption-it is to be understood that a law of terror trusts, by acts of punishment falling here and there, to stop the whole current of their lives! If it were possible to impress upon every man's mind the unalterable conviction that the next offence he commits will put him into the hands of justice, and be his last, it might be conceived to stop offences. But when the conviction upon every man's mind is, that his next offence will not be his last-what can it stop? If he can flatter himself with impunity for the next crime, that is all that is required for all offences to be committed. The undefined terror of the law will indeed keep within limits those who have not yet overstepped them; because they do not calculate impunity. They are now safe; and then they would be under danger. But he who has already violated the law, can feel no restraint from its terror; - he has passed through danger, and the next step is as likely to be safe, as the last, perhaps more so. But let it be added, that he is corrupt. There is for him, within the pale of ordered society, no life; then he must find a life without its pale. His corruption of life is upon him a necessity to go on in violation of the law. What man is there who stops in the prosecution of his calling, because it daily endangers his limb or his life? Do we imagine it is to make a difference to the man, that the peril is not from accident ever at hand, but

from the distant and uncertain interposition of law? There is, indeed, a terror of punishment, which is frightful to our minds, and which may envelop the young offender with fears; but that is only because he is making the step of transition from safe untroubled life, to the perturbed life of guilt. His own soul is up in arms against him; and the terror that rings in his ears, is from within. But he has only to go on, and perturbation will become so familiar, that it will no longer alarm him. The disorder of his passions, the unsettled courses and agitated scenes of lawless life, the trouble of conscience which he may yet feel-anger, and suspicion, and hate, mutual with those about him, will make one eternal deafening tumult in his mind, in which the fears of human law will be little heard and hardly distinguished. The temper of mind which the man must acquire, who is to go on resolutely in a guilty life, is, independently of all superadded terrors of human law, a temper of reckless defiance; and whether to the pains, fears, hinderances, miseries of every sort, which that defiance must overcome, be yet added the menace of the law, may appear to make little difference in the strength of desperate will that is required to entertain that temper. Heap men together in depravitygive them a common purpose-and but one way of life before them, and who is he that knows so little of men, as to imagine that they will falter from each other's purpose, because it leads them in the front of death? The whole history of confederated criminals is evidence of the terrible courage which men acquire in guilt. How do we expect that terror of the law is now to quell those whom it has never quelled? Let us not deceive ourselves. If criminals are few, the law may deliver society by their extirpation. But if they are gathered together in uncounted numbers, and supplied from an inexhaustible source,-that is, if their strength is established in the common corruption and depravity of a great body of a people,-the deliverance of society must be effected by some other aid, than was ever in the hand of avenging Justice.