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agriculture was quite a secondary consideration among the population, which consisted mainly of miners and fishermen. South Wales at the period of Young's visit was rapidly rising into importance by reason of its extensive iron and copper works. In North Wales the population engaged in occupations of a purely pastoral nature. In Cheshire it was the same. Lancashire manifested some faint signs here and there of working its vast coalfields. Mid-Lancashire was a district almost entirely agricultural. Over the county of Yorkshire Arthur Young toured with very mixed feelings. He states that he journeyed from Newton along a road across Hambledon, a tract of country which has not the epithet black given it for nothing; for it is a continued range of black moors, eleven or twelve miles long, and from four to eight broad. It is melancholy to travel through such desolate land, when it is so palpably capable of improvement.' After passing a succession of such dreary solitary wastes, he beheld a sight that gladdened his heart, an immense plain, comprehending almost all Cleveland, finely cultivated, the verdure beautiful.' In the neighbourhood of Newbigill he beheld with great satisfaction 'many improvements of moors by that spirited cultivator the Earl of Darlington.' The twelve miles of country which he passed through between Bowes and Brough filled him with deep regret. The county of Durham exhibited many 'wide tracts of desolate moor,' and what land there was under cultivation stood sorely in need of drainage. In Northumberland Young found millions of acres of improvable moors, which he describes 'as waste as when ravaged by the fury of the Scottish Borderers.'

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE CRIMINAL CODE.

Barbarous nature of the criminal code-Writings of Romilly and Madan upon it-Sun:mary of the penal enactments then in force-Legislative apathy in the reform of the criminal code-Trading justices-Public executions and their attendant evils-Tyburn, and the way there— Popular relish for hangings-Public dissection of malefactors-Suspension in chains-Abolition of the Tyburn procession-Dr. Johnson's opinion touching its expediency-Burning for petit treason-Peine forte et dure The pillory and its abuses-The prisons-Incarceration for debt-John Howard and the prison world of England-The Hulks system-Transportation of convicts to New South Wales.

SOME Considerable capability for relying upon evidence is positively necessary, not merely in order to understand, but to repose any credence in the criminal code of this land as it existed in the period under inquiry, seeing that that code was one which by combining the elements of the barbarous and the ridiculous in a degree of which it is difficult to convey any adequate conception, was not only a disgrace to human nature, but a standing insult to every principle of justice, and to all the more sacred ties which link man with man. Regarded from the Victorian era, the folly and the cruelty of the penal enactments under which the English people were then content to live appears almost incredible, while the records connected with their various branches fully equal the marvels of old romance, with this fundamental difference only-that there is nothing in the least romantic about them.

The latter quarter of the eighteenth century was a peculiarly fermenting epoch, and the violence of the fermentation was both deeply and widely spread. All the nations of Europe seemed to be seething with excitement and pregnant with possibilities of mutation and of changes that were to affect the

social and political conditions of both governments and classes. Symptoms of the coming change manifested themselves far and wide throughout England in the remarkable quickening of the spirit of inquiry into all radical questions, and in a better understanding of their nature; in the undisguised contempt which thoughtful men began to evince for the reverence which was paid to representative institutions; in the energy with which they sought to destroy the iniquities and absurdities of our criminal jurisprudence; in the heavy blows that they dealt at the anomalies which disfigured the statute book, and at the looseness of thought which produced the fulsome eulogies and the empty platitudes on 'our happy Constitution in Church and State.' A silver lining to the dark cloud which had hung so long over the British penal code was seen in the anonymous publication towards the close of the year 1786 by Thomas Cadell, an eminent London bookseller, whose name is familiar to almost every reader of Boswell's Life of Johnson,' of a small pamphlet called 'Observations on a late publication intituled Thoughts on Executive Justice,' written, as its title implies, in answer to one which had recently proceeded from the pen of the Rev. Frederick Madan, a prominent adherent of the Evangelical school. The author of this timely brochure was Sir Samuel Romilly, a very eminent lawyer, as well as a very distinguished member of parliament in that age, who having come to a conclusion similar to that at which Lord Bacon had arrived two centuries before (namely, that as Time is the greatest of all innovators, its suggestions should not be resisted), proposed to commute, in certain cases, capital punishment for banishment and imprisonment. Nor was that all. Romilly wished to define crimes more precisely than the law then did, and to circumscribe the arbitrary power of infliction that was then given to the judges-power which extended from a few months' imprisonment to the pains of death for one and the same offence. It would be impossible to point to any contemporary publication in which the English code of the eighteenth century is summarised in a more able manner for those who run to read than it is in Romilly's calm and profound disquisition, as an abstract of it will fully demonstrate.

Romilly begins his pamphlet by commenting leisurely on the rapid progress which the popular study of criminal jurisprudence had made, at the time of writing, in the different countries of Europe, and notes with satisfaction that such study had been instrumental in the upheaval of many absurd and barbarous notions of justice that had been prevalent for centuries, and in the adoption of rational principles in their stead. He then goes on to say that almost the only country in which the progress of those principles had been barren of results in regard to the mitigation of the criminal code was England, and that so far from there being any prospect of such a reformation,' an attempt had actually been made to restore the law to all its sanguinary rigour by the author of Thoughts on Executive Justice, with respect to criminal laws' (Madan), a work which he characterises as proceeding on principles which were then little prevalent, and as breathing a spirit contrary to the genius of the times. Why then, it may be asked, did he attempt to refute it? Simply because he had found 'that the warmth and earnestness of the author's style had gained him converts, and that some of the learned judges to whom his work was addressed had seemed inclined to try the terrible expedient which he recommended.'1

In order that his readers may be in a position to judge of the good sense and propriety of Madan's doctrines, Romilly proceeds to pass in review those laws which he had so fervently panegyrised in his pamphlet, and concerning which he had expressed his doubts as to whether any other human system could equal them for the prevention of public injury.

In entering upon this task (says Romilly), the first thing which strikes one is the melancholy truth that among the variety of actions which men are daily liable to commit, no less than a hundred and sixty have been declared by act of parliament to be felonies without benefit of clergy; or, in other words, to be worthy of instant death.2

In this passage he is citing from Blackstone's Commentaries, and in a note draws attention to the fact that since the publication of those commentaries, the number of felonies had been Ibid., p. 16.

1 Observations, p. 6.

considerably augmented by the legislature. Of what nature were the crimes of which this loathsome catalogue was composed? Let us see. To steal a horse or a sheep-to snatch property from the hands of a man and run away with it-to steal to the amount of forty shillings in a dwelling-house, or privately to the value of five shillings in a shop-to pick a pocket of only twelve pence and a farthing-these offences all continued till the end of the eighteenth century to be punishable with death! On the other hand, the attempt of a man to murder his own father was regarded in no other light than that of a misdemeanor. The taking away of the life of another, and the branding of his name with ignominy, was neither considered murder, nor was it deemed deserving of capital punishment. The stabbing of another under circumstances of the blackest malice, if the unfortunate object after a long and painful illness recovered of his wound only to breathe out the rest of his days in torment and disease, was punishable only by fine and imprisonment; the burning of a house, of which the incendiary happened to possess a lease, though it was situated in the centre of a town, and consequently endangered the lives of hundreds of human creatures, was liable to no severe punishment! Inconsistencies still grosser might have easily been detected in the legal definition of crimes. Thus, in certain circumstances, it was possible for a man to steal without being a thief, for a pickpocket to be a highway robber, for a shop-lifter to be a burglar, and for a man who had not the slightest intention of causing injury to the person of anybody to be a murderer. Snatching a watch from a man's pocket was a highway robbery. The theft of ready-gathered fruit was a felony. The gathering of fruit, and the theft of it, was accounted nothing more than a trespass. He who forced his hand through a pane of glass at five o'clock in the afternoon during winter, for the purpose of removing anything that might happen to be in the window, was a burglar, even though nothing might have actually been taken by him. He who, on the other hand, broke open a house, with every circumstance of violence and outrage, at four o'clock in the morning in summer, with the object of robbing, and even murdering its inmates, was classed only

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