voke them, is construed into the language of rhetoric rather than of logic;' as if, in matters so perfectly indifferent as right and wrong, the natural feelings and sentiments of the human heart were an informality and impertinence! There is no escaping from this battery, but by taking shelter (which is indeed the object aimed at) in the systematic avowal of every species of moral scepticism and political profligacy. The first and most obvious movement of power and prejudice, when it is likely to be driven out of any of its strongholds, is to raise a violent outcry against all innovation, as opening a door to unbounded licentiousness, confusion and disorder, which is to burst upon us like a Levanter,' and involve every thing sacred or valuable in social institutions in a common ruin. When alarm will no longer avail, artifice is resorted to: they descend from nicknames and hyperboles to special pleading and chicanery; and the next step in the progress is to profess, not to resist the wishes of the public, but to calm and moderate its eagerness-not to exclude innovation altogether, but to let it in with caution, and by degrees,-to examine, to sift objections, and sit as umpires between the possible and the desirable, between theory and practice; and, under the cover of this profession, to stultify the whole proceeding piecemeal, to embarrass, to evade, to demur, to raise difficulties, to give forked counsel,' to palliate the worst things, to throw cold water on the most encouraging prospects; in short, though improvement be improvement, yet to throw such changes of vexation on it, as it may lose some colour;' and if any thing in the shape of reform must come, to let it come as late, and do as little good as possible. Thus it has been proposed, as the result of a grave deliberation on the projected revision of our Criminal Laws, and as one of the lofty speculations of a great master-mind (now no more), not to make any alteration in the laws themselves (with the exception of one or two, too ridiculous and harmless to admit a question), but to alter the arrangement, or to throw them altogether, just as they now stand, into one act, with a new title, and perhaps an index! This, it is thought, might answer to all the conditions of the minimum of a reluctant reform, and the maximum of a wise legislation!

It looks well, however, for the cause of humanity, when any thing short of the last outrage and abuse is heaped on its advocates, and its very name. We are not disappointed to learn, that the only premeditated attempt to slur the evidence, or to cast a doubt on the fairness of the proceedings in the Committee, has been sanctioned in a quarter, from which it

comes with the least prejudicial effect, and with the best grace in the world!

Before we proceed, we shall be allowed to indulge in one or two general observations, as not unimportant in their bearing on the present subject. The first will relate to the spirit in which (as it appears to us) legislative inquiries should be conducted, either by those who have to suggest, or whose business it is to carry them into effect;-the second, to the progress which has been of late years made in such inquiries, by those who have more particularly made them the objects of their study.

To begin with the first. In the Memoirs of Granville Sharp, lately published, there is an anecdote recorded of the young Prince Naimbanna, well worthy the attention of all unfledged sophists, and embryo politicians.

The name of a person having been mentioned in his presence, who was understood by him to have publicly asserted something very degrading to the general character of Africans, he broke out into violent and vindictive language. He was immediately reminded of the Christian duty of forgiving his enemies; upon which he answered nearly in the following words :—“ If a man should rob me of my money, I can forgive him; if a man should shoot at me, or try to stab me, I can forgive him; if a man should sell me and all my family to a slave-ship, so that we should pass all the rest of our days in slavery in the West Indies, I can forgive him; but" (added he, rising from his seat with much emotion) "if a man takes away the character of the people of my country, I never can forgive him. Being asked, why he would not extend his forgiveness to those who took away the character of the people of his country, be answered-" If a man should try to kill me, or should sell me and my family for slaves, he would do an injury to as many as he might kill or sell; but if any one takes away the character of Black people, that man injures Black people all over the world; and when he has once taken away their character, there is nothing that he may not do to Black people ever after. That man, for instance, will beat Black men, and say, Oh, it is only a Black man, why should I not beat him? That man will make slaves of Black people; for when he has taken away their character, he will say, Oh, they are only Black people, why should I not make them slaves? That man will take away all the people of Africa if he can catch them; and if you ask him, But why do you take away all these people? he will say, Oh, they are only Black people-why should I not take them? That is the reason why I cannot forgive the man who takes away the character of the people of my country." p. 369. -So we conceive, that if we take away the character of the people of this country, or of any large proportion of them, there is no degree of turpitude or injustice that we may not introduce into the measures and treatment which we consider as

most fit for them. To legislate wisely, and for the best, it is necessary that we should think as well, and not as ill, as possible, of those for whom we legislate; or otherwise we shall soon reduce them to the level of our own theories. To treat men as brute beasts in our speculations, is to encourage ourselves to treat them as such in our practice; and that is the way to make them what we pretend to believe they are. To take it for granted that any class of the community is utterly depraved and incorrigible, is not the way either to improve our own treatment of them, or to correct their vicious qualities. And when we see the lower classes of the English people uniformly singled out as marks for the malice or servility of a certain description of writers-when we see them studiously separated, like a degraded caste, from the rest of the community, with scarcely the attributes and faculties of the species allowed them,-nay, when they are thrust lower in the scale of humanity than the same classes of any other nation in Europe-though it is to these very classes that we owe the valour of our naval and military heroes, the industry of our artisans and labouring mechanics, and all that we have been told, again and again, elevates us above every other nation in Europe-when we see the redundant population (as it is fashionably called) selected as the butt for every effusion of paltry spite, and as the last resource of vindictive penal statutes-when we see every existing evil derived from this unfortunate race, and every possible vice ascribed to them-when we are accustomed to hear the poor, the uninformed, the friendless, put, by tacit consent, out of the pale of society when their faults and wretchedness are exaggerated with eager impatience, and still greater impatience is shown at every expression of a wish to amend them-when they are familiarly spoken of as a sort of vermin only fit to be hunted down, and exterminated at the discretion of their betters :-we know pretty well what to think, both of the disinterestedness of the motives which give currency to this jargon, and of the wisdom of the policy which should either sanction, or suffer itself to be influenced by its suggestions.

Men do not willingly belie their own forebodings of disaster. There is no malice so strong as the antipathy of ill to good, where it has once taken root and disclosed itself: there is no invention so keen or relentless as that which dreads to be defrauded of its promised repast on vice and misery. On his own showing, the state-physician may be asked to resign his charge, when he pronounces the disorder to be incurable; and to leave the patient to take his chance of a recovery in the hands of those who are more rash, more san

guine, or more skilful. flat despair. ' Secondly, it is common, in speaking of the proposed amend ments in this department of our laws, to make a pointed distinction between theory and practice. Now, we beg leave to except against this distinction, in the sense at least in which it is insisted on, nine times out of ten, or in questions of any real difficulty. It is usual to contend, that a thing may hold good in theory, though it is wrong in practice, and that the practice of the law may be good, though every theory is against it. Now, it is so far from being true, that there is any such natural opposition between these things, that if a theory does not answer in practice, it is proof positive that the theory is good for nothing; and no practice can be good that is at variance with sound theory. Theory, indeed, is nothing but assigning the reasons or principles according to which causes and effects are connected together in fact. No theory is good for any thing that is not founded on general observation and experience; and, where this is the case, it must hold good generally as a guide or rule to direct our decisions or expectations, if properly applied. On the other hand, if it is partially collected or erroneously applied, it is either unfounded in itself, or does not really affect the point in hand. A vague theory that does not rest on the efficient and essential principles of things, will indeed necessarily deceive us; just as that sort of practice, which is confined to a particular case, can never be made an example or authority for any other. Individual practice, however, it should be observed, is more often and more pointedly at variance with itself than with the wildest theory that could be suggested to explain it.

Our final hope' at worst, can be but

There are people to be sure, who cannot imagine any thing possible or endurable which is not the actual practice of the time and place and society in which they happen to be born; and who cry out against that as a dangerous and impracticable theory, which is the actual practice, and has been so from time immemorial of some other place, perhaps not twenty miles distant; the inhabitants of which are equally convinced of the impossibility or dreadful consequences of every other practice but their own. This, however, is not reason or experience, but the want of it; sound theory being merely a larger reason, exercised and making its election on a more extended experience or practice, by reduc ing the clashing instances to some general principles. We every day hear people, for example, in this country, who talk of the comparative advantages of a Monarchy or a Republic, and treat the former as a practical reality, and the other as a mere theory or imagination;-as if a republic was not a thing really existing

VOL. XXXV. No. 70.

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in rerum natura-as if Holland and America and Switzerland, and ancient Greece and Rome, had been chimeras conjured up in the fantastic brain of some Utopia-monger-or as if it were no more possible to live under such a form of government than in fire, or on air or under water-because we live under the British monarchy! Our gross actual experience is thus set up as the limit of possibility; and what we approve without knowing the reason, is that which can alone approve itself to the reason of things, our ignorance and interest being made the standards of truth, of right and wrong; and this we call keeping up the just distinction between theory and practice!

Now, it is exactly in this spirit that we hear people talking of the abolition of Capital Punishment for the most trifling offences, as a theory just dropped from the clouds, as a dream of some whimsical and inexperienced enthusiast, who does not know what is going on in the world, or see by what intricate machinery the stealing in a shop to the value of five shillings, or in a dwellinghouse or on a navigable river to the amount of forty shillings, if not punished with death, would lead to the destruction of all law and of all property-for no other reason than that this is the only country upon earth where these offences are ordered to be so punished; and not considering that there are other countries where capital punishment is abolished altogether, which yet hold up their heads and give signs of life; and that, in this very country, the only refuge of security and property, the law which enacts the punishment of such offences, is itself no better than a theory, a mere dead letter: Or, if driven from this ground, they then insist that it is the change from the practice to the theory that is fraught with such tremendous consequences, and should be made with such caution, or not at all; though the abolition, or total alteration of the whole code of penal law in Tuscany, in Austria, and in Russia, was effected by one or two positive edicts, in our own times, as silently and peacefully as morning brought by night. Yet, these are the people who look very wise when the word theory is mentioned, and give themselves out for the only solid matter-of-fact reasoners.

The truth indeed is, that pretended practical reasoners are the worst and most mischievous of all others: They prefer eustom' (or what they have been taught to consider as such) before all excellence,' and are uniformly adverse to every scheme that is suggested for the improvement of social institutions. We see the same names (some of them great and grave ones too) opposed successively to the Abolition of the SlaveTrade, to the concession of the Catholic Claims, and to the Amelioration of the Penal Laws,-on the same stale plea of guarding