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and impertinent question. It's just like that low Court of Common Council ! Where ?-Of course from the pockets of the citizens of London-from their lawfully-acquired cash. And they grumble.—Gratitude must have flown from the world. It's gone to “ brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason.

Oh for an hour of Lord Castlereagh to lecture city dwellers on their “ignorant impatience of taxation.” Ladies and gentlemen! cash up-come. You have nothing to do but to pay. The recipients have nothing to do but to spend. 'Tis but a realisation of the great principle of division of labour. Besides, the city authorities have a right “to do what they like with their own. Your pockets are theirs. It is quite a vulgar fallacy-as Alderman Wilson would demonstrate to you in a trice-to think otherwise. The Lord Mayor and the Court of Aldermen hold the city purse-strings. They are privileged to make ducks and drakes of the money—and geese of themselves—whenever it pleaseth them.

And therefore, 0 citizens ! cease vain complainings, which bring but vexation ;-and you, O Common Council ! retire into your domestic sancta, and reverently opening your Slakspeares, ponder with that—in all respects but his wit-most aldermanic personage, Sir Toby Belch, over the great, the eternal, the immutable answer, which, while the world is the world, must always reply to the Question :

“ Because thou art virtuous, shall there be no more cakes and ale?"

ANGUS B. REACH.

CRIMINALS.

The most atrocious criminals were innocent little babies once, and they grew up to be hanged ! Of two men born on the same day, it has happened that one has been launched into eternity by the hangman, whilst the other has been taken to his place in the respectable family vault, and his memory rejoices in an epitaph, blossoming with those scentless virtues which spring up so plentifully for dead men when they have not to be buried at the expense of the parish. The distribution of the affairs of this world seems such a tangled web of arbitrary arrangements --- good and evil, right and wrong--that we cannot penetrate to the principle which governs it.

Causes and effects have become so complicated and involved, that they seem to have lost their essential nature, and become detached fragments of that vast chapter of accidents which we call - this world. As we chance to look out of ourselves on what surrounds us, everything seems an ordinary occurrence or a miracle ; it is both, or either, according to the spirit in which we look. A thing that is no wonder, when we consider it as an occurrence which has taken place before our eyes every day till we have ceased to regard it, becomes a portion of the deep mystery of life which lies around usma miracle, when we endeavour to trace its cause and find ourselves baffled in the attempt to disa cover the principle, that has given utterance to the fact.

A criminal placed at the bar is the most ordinary of events in the life of the gaolers, the turnkeys, the judges, and the lawyers, who have either to defend or prosecute him it is the staple of their life- their very means of existence grow out of the fact of men being brought to judgment for the crimes they have committed ; they are become matters of business, matters of course, in which the only note-worthy point is the acuteness and dexterity by which they have been discovered and placed at the bar ; and yet the community at large feels an intense curiosity to learn details of the former life, habits, and environments of criminals, whose deeds have obtained any notoriety ; provided their crimes have not arisen from an impulse of insanity, which is a moral outlawry from fellow-feeling.

A criminal, standing at the bar, belongs to men, and yet is of a different order ; he has made an experience, which few of those who are listening to his triál dare to think on. He has realised what that thing is which men call CRIME,MURDER, RAPE, INCEST, are only words to the generality of men ; they do not realise them as actual things, until they are resolved into the hard, crushing fact of a DEED COMMITTED ; then all men feel a horrified eagerness to see the shape those things take when incarnated in one of our own brotherhood. He is a connecting link between each one in that assembly and the sin of which he stands accused ; and none can defend himself against the fear, the horrible possibility, that the accused thing may enter into him too, and make him what he is now beholding.

So long as we read of crime in sermons and moral essays, it does not tempt us; we feel as if we were separated by a deep and well-defined gulf, fixed between us and all that sort of thing; but the actual sight of a criminal sends a spasm of terror through our

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heart, and the conviction of the insecurity of our moral tenure is forced upon us.

If we were all of us to detail candidly our own experience, it would be found that many amongst us (most of us, perhaps,) had retained our fair character and reputation in the world, more from fortunate accidents, a happy concurrence of circumstances, than by any overpowering force of moral strength or clearness of judgment. There are times in the experience of nearly all men, when they have been very near committing some grievous misdeed, which would have cast them down from the high places of respectability; and it may have been a mere point of time, five minutes more or less, which has been the turning-point of their destiny. Things never look like what they really are, at the moment of their being done ; and there are times when we all of us think

; thoughts and feel inclined to commit actions, from which at ordinary times we should start with dismay and abhorrence. At such a crisis, it is the turning of a straw what we shall become; a look, La tone, a casual expression dropped in our hearing,—a remembered epithet (though originally applied, it may be, to some quite different subject); nothing, in short, is too weak or trivial to be the means of turning the current of our actions, and saving us from shipwreck as by the breadth of a hair. There are moral casualties as well as physical ones, and ACCIDENTS are not confined to breaking one's leg, or being run over by a carriage. It is this consciousness that lies at the bottom of the morbid curiosity about criminals.

The charm of criminal literature, the spell by which it holds us in spite of the revolting of our tastes and habits, is, that it shows the criminal in his human and social relationship ; -- the steps by which he was led to the commission of the crime are shewn; the surrounding circumstances are brought to light; the reader is made to feel the moral magnetism of the temptation, and the crime ceases to be the abstract thing it is in the statute-book.

We recognise in the criminal a man like unto ourselves, and we feel a thrilling interest in learning by what steps he came to be an outcast, what temptations, what passions, what necessities brought him into that degraded isolation from us,—and we each feel it a relief, a respite as from condemnation on ourselves, when we can stop at points of his history and say—“No, I could not have done 80—with that act I can feel no sympathy—I must needs have done otherwise.”

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The form in which sympathy with criminals gets manifested is often disgusting enough. There is nothing to be said of pic-nic parties to the scene of a horrid murder ; to the relics of hanged scoundrels being sought and paid for at a higher rate than the relics of saints and martyrs were in old times; nor to irreverent, almost blasphemous exhibitions of the “happy death” and " hopeful end” of miscreants, at whose crimes we feel a horror. All that sort of thing is an unutterable abomination ; still there must be a cause, it could not exist, except in right of being a genuine sentiment, a protest of the deep sympathy between mản and man ;-the voice of the universal brotherhood, which makes us all one nature. It is the beginning of a better spirit. Formerly when judicial torture was part of the administration of justice, criminals were not regarded as human beings,--they were only an impersonation of evil deeds to be expiated in their person. It was in accordance with the secret desire of seeing vengeance taken on an evil deed, which lies at the bottom in all human hearts, and the natural cowardice, which, even more than moral reprobation, instigates barbarous punishments ; : each one. hoped that thereby the evil might be frightened from his own door ;--as a farmer nails up a dead kite over his barn, that his poultry may dwell safe under its shadow. Of late the feeling has been gaining ground that no man however bad ought to be put to death. The cowardly selfish impulse which made men formerly anxious to put away criminals, as the most compendious mode of preventing fürther danger, in the fear lest their own: turn should come next, has given place to a better spirit.

Amongst the world's réprouvés, are often found individuals endued with far higher capacities and qualities, both of heart and intellect, than can be boasted by many who have been advanced to high consideration amongst the world's respectable children. It is always to the last a question, whether a man endowed with strong positive qualities shall become a scoundrel or a hero ;-for positive qualities always cut both ways, and unless there be great sagacity to guide them, it is a great chance whether the actions that spring from them will be wise or foolish. It is not the accident of a crime committed that makes a man a reprobate—a man's actions are only the tangible symptom and manifestation of the moral element in which he habitually dwells,--which is the standard of what he really is:—for a man is always greater both for better and worse, than anything he actually does. It may chance

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that the crime, the act, by which a man throws himself into collision with society, may be far less wicked than the previous silent, unobserved demoralisation in which his life has glided on ;—it is that previous course of demoralisation that is fearful, that is fatal ; the accident of the crime which crowns the whole, is a symptom of the extent to which the moral deterioration has arrived, it is only the natural expression of a condition that has gone on unchecked and unheeded day after day.

An act of crime has not unfrequently arisen from an incongruous display of better qualities, not worked out into stedfast principles; nor yet choked up, nor altogether stifled ;—but acting in random impulses ;-grains of gold that have not amalgamated with the baser material, and although precious in themselves, causing weakness and failure by their want of unity and coherence. But that is as it may be.—Jonathan Wild, who is an authority on such matters, used to declare, that most men were ruined by not being wicked enough when they were about it: we only insist on the fact, that what is seen in action, is only a symptom of the inner life, from which it is thrown forth ; as the Apostle says, things which are seen are not made from those which do appear.

There is an unfathomable depth of indolence lying at the bottom of the deep heart of man, in which the Mystery of Iniquity, and all the other Mysteries of Humanity, have their root. Whatever may be said of SELF-INTEREST as the moving spring of all men's actions, it is only true to a small extent ; men are much more immediately influenced by their convenience than their interest. That which men find very inconvenient to do, can never arouse their sympathy or enthusiasm ;-men are slow to believe their interest can lie in what is troublesome. In that sneaking, indolent sensualism, that tendency to what is convenient, —easiest,- done at the moment,- lies the germ of all crime; it is the element in which depravity developes itself ; the rank, steaming hot-bed of all that is vile and refuse in Humanity. Physiologists say that an organ which has once got decayed, has a tendency to continue to perform its functions wrong (the mere force of habit) long after the disorder is remedied; the same tendency is seen through the whole economy. Men go on in a certain course, because they have begun ;--the impetus of one day throws them into the next ;-circumstances grow out of each other ;--men are carried along by an imperceptible current, set in from their own previous acts, and they have no force in themselves to turn aside their course.