Auguste, you must meet me to-night at the door of the empty cottage in the shrubbery; we will then concert measures for the depart. ure of one you hold so dear. For the present it is unavoidable; but we must keep Du Plessis in the dark.

"Perhaps this masked ball will aid us," said Le Blond.

"I trust it will," replied Sophia. "I will contrive to steal away at twelve o'clock from the dancers, when you must also be sure to be at the cottage door-I keep the key. I need not ask you to be discreet for all our sakes-for all we love."

Le Blond uttered in a lower tone, "Dearest, kindest Sophia, the hours will appear an age until I dare again see my beloved-my wife. Sophia, you have been my preserver.

Here Sophia and Le Blond walked towards the château, whilst Du Plessis remained almost petrified. He felt himself at the moment to be merely an object of derision; and though the duplicity of Sophia ought to have made him despise her, yet the recollection of her charms still swayed over his heart and imagination; but his ire was raised against Le Blond, who, under the mask of friendship, had made an amusement of his credulity. He then reverted to Sophia. Had he not seen her turn pale ?-he had read in her eyes the passion which he himself had felt. He then determined not to be driven away in despair-to stay the masked fête--to watch their midnight appointment at the empty cottage-and then to confront and confound them.

[In our next we shall give the conclusion of this eventful history.]

TO ALURA.

I.

TELL me the hour-the sacred hour,

When thou art resign'd to Feeling's power,

When thy lip is not wreathed with affected mirth,
And thy words are not breath'd for the dull cold earth!
When thy heart-dews are wept, and thy fancies receive
Fresh sweetness of thought from the tears that they leave:
Tell me that hour-that sacred hour-

I would then be a pilgrim, sweet saint, to thy bower!

II.

Tell me the hour-the lonely hour,

When thou art all rapt in Music's power,-
When thy lute is not strung for the cold or gay,
And thy spirit hath flung its light mirth away!
When thy soul is subdued into twilight repose,
And thy soft voice is breathed like the sigh of a rose :
Tell me that hour-that lonely hour—

I would then be a pilgrim, sweet saint, to thy bower!

J. AUGUSTINE WADE.

476

MORAL ECONOMY OF LARGE TOWNS.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.

BY DR. W. C. TAYLOR.

WHAT may be called social science is yet in its infancy; like the young Hercules it has been attacked by serpents in its cradle-unlike him, it has not succeeded in crushing the venomous reptiles; the fangs have been driven deep, the poison circulates through all its veins. It is received almost as an axiom that vice and misery must necessarily co-exist with every large aggregation of human beings, and that all efforts for their extirpation are and must be utterly unavailing. An appeal is made to statistical science for evidence of this disheartening fact; the criminal records of almost every country prove that crimes are annually produced in very nearly the same number, the same order, and the same districts. Every class of crime also is found to have peculiar and unvariable relations to sex, age, and season; even the proportions of accessory circumstances seem fixed and definite; the instruments employed in committing murder, which one would suppose to be a fact wholly dependant on accident or caprice, are found to follow some inexplicable rule, and to recur in nearly the same proportions in successive returns. There is a double tax of human suffering levied more regularly, and paid more punctually than those imposed by the Parliament; on the one side injury to property or person; on the other, imprisonment, transporta tion, and the scaffold. This double tax cannot be imputed to the Chancellor of the Exchequer; in every sense of the word it is beyond Baring. He cannot easily predict whether there will be a surplus or a deficit in the revenue for the spring or autumn quarter; but the statistician can prophesy with all but mathematical precision how many will raise the assassin's knife, administer the drugged chalice, or in minor crimes, how many will pick locks and pockets. The statistics of crime are as fixed as those of vitality, yet few, miserably few efforts have been made to discover the nature of the laws by which they are regulated.

From the regular sequence of crime in society it is obvious that society must itself both produce the germs of guilt, and offer the facilities necessary for their development. Every social condition and state contain within themselves a certain number, and a certain order of offences, which result as necessary consequences from their organisation; it would be almost just to say, that society prepares the crime, and that the ostensible criminal is only the instrument by which it is executed.

These observations may at the first glance appear discouraging to philanthropy, and degrading to humanity; but, when more closely examined, they will be found full of consolation for the one, and of hope for the other. They show that the cause is not in nature, but in artificial institutions, and, consequently, that there is a possibility of ameliorating life by making some changes in the condition of social existence.

Society having engendered crime, was driven by necessity to devise punishment as a remedy. No error is more common and more

pernicious than to regard punishment as a mere act of vengeance, inflicted with somewhat of the same blind rage that a child displays when it beats the table against which it has run, or the ground upon which it has fallen. Were such the mere object of punishment, society would be guilty of a gross blunder in inflicting any penalty. Crime must be restrained, simply because it produces suffering; and it would be an absurd proceeding to commence the cure by increasing the amount of the evil. Fatal has been the association between the ideas of law and vengeance; it has often given to aggregated masses the passions of the isolated savage, and has led the assailed individual to regard society as merely collective tyranny. But, though not merely the inconsistency, but the positive repulsion between the administration of justice, and the infliction of pain for the mere sake of producing pain, is manifest on the slightest consideration; yet grave divines, eminent statesmen, and learned lawyers, have contrived to jumble both notions together, and to fix our enmity to the crime, in all its intensity, upon the unhappy criminal. Examples of this mischievous, and, in many cases, not undesigned confusion, will multiply upon us as we proceed; at present it may be sufficient to enunciate, as a recognised truth, that the only legitimate object of penal law is prevention of guilt, not vengeance on the guilty; and to add, that the latter notion is absolutely subversive of the principles on which the order and happiness of society are founded.

The history of punishments, viewed in relation to their proper object, the prevention of crime, would form a strange chapter in the annals of human absurdity. While the blood runs cold at the description of the various tortures devised by perverted and horrible ingenuity to increase the terrors of death, the rack, the wheel, the stake, and the pale-while we shrink back aghast from the black catalogue of offences against which death was denounced with indiscriminate severity—it is scarcely possible to avoid laughing at the utter inadequacy of the means to the end, and the signal failure of the plan for repressing crime by the simple expedient of getting rid of the criminal.

Experience, in fact, has proved, that the worst use to which you can turn a man is to turn him off at the scaffold-that in drinking and hanging there may be such a thing as a drop too much-that the toll levied at Tyburn, when it was a turnpike to eternity, instead of to Uxbridge, was rather exorbitant-and that death was, after all, an inadequate remedy for the evils of life. Common sense urged that a change from this world to the next was rather too much change to give for a forged note or a bad shilling; and doubts were entertained of the trilogy which described a church, a tavern and a gibbet, as the essential characteristics of a civilized country. Improved markets were once described, in a Waterford paper, by the phrase, “dead pigs are looking up;" but nobody would venture to assert, that improved morals could be tested by dead men looking up or down. In short, respice funem proved to be an exceedingly pernicious version of the aphorism, respice finem.

Public opinion, wearied of finding newspapers, by their frequent report of executions, turned into noose-papers, began to condemn the punishment and pardon the criminal. Prosecutors refused to become persecutors; witnesses withheld evidence; and juries found verdicts, in which the classification of legal crimes was treated with a contempt,

of which finding a man guilty of manslaughter who had stolen a pair of leathern breeches, is far from being an exaggerated specimen. Sentences were also rarely followed by executions. The prerogative of mercy was so frequently exercised, that criminals were as much in suspense before an execution as after; and, in consequence of the uncertainty of suffering, candidates for the halter became rather more numerous than those for the altar. It was manifest that the rope had failed, and consequently it was necessary to try some other line. To use the miserable pun which is sculptured at Blenheim-Gallows was a cock that would not fight.

These truths were manifest to all the world except statesmen and legislators. For more than half a century the amelioration of our criminal code was resisted by the lovers of things as they are, with as much zeal as if pensions and suspensions had been intimately connect ed. A clamour was raised against those who proposed that milder measures should be adopted; it was insinuated that they were taking precautionary steps for their own safety. Thus, when an essay on the Abolition of Capital Punishments was read in the Philosophical Society of Cork, it was officially described in the following terms

Next orator Dowden harangued

Till the ears of his hearers were callous;
And, knowing he's sure to be hang'd,
Endeavour'd to tumble the gallows.

Dowden, however, still survives-and Jack Ketch may exclaim"Othello's occupation's gone!"

Hanging was suspended, or rather dropped, and transportation came into fashion. It furnished the means of getting rid of the criminal without taking away life; and this apparent mercy dis. guised the clumsiness of the expedient. It is truly surprising how long it took people to discover that penal colonies are enormous blunders, and that moral reformation is hopeless in aggregations of prigs, prostitutes, and pickpockets. In such a society, vice of neces sity became the prime element of the social system, and "not to be corrupted was the shame." Thieves' Latin became a sort of court language at Sidney; Grose took the place of Johnson, and, of course, grossness carried the day over decency. Profane swearing went to such an extent, that New Holland, like old Holland, became a country of damns; picking pockets reached the perfection which might be expected in a country where nature has supplied kangaroos with pouches, for the express purpose of training young practitioners in the art of conveyancing: instead of a continent, Australia became an incontinent; the name of the southern island was like to be extended to the group, and the whole named Van Dæmon's Land; the very ocean seemed about to change name and nature, and to become Belligerent instead of Pacific. Transportation was, in fact, a joke to the criminal, and no joke to everybody else. These results, which individual sagacity might easily have predicted, sorely perplexed collective wisdom. The Ornithorynchus Paradoxus was not more puzzling to philosophers, than the Sidney-thievus-paradoxus to statesmen. They had dreamed that Australia would be a new Arcadia, and found, on waking, that the country was going to pot instead of to Pan.

The next expedient was Penitentiary Reform. It was proposed that gaols should become adult schools; turnkeys, moral lecturers; fetters, Lockes on the Human Understanding; and the tread-mill itself a new Gradus ad Parnassum. They seem, however, to have forgotten that it is not so easy to keep the pupils of a gaol as the pupils of the eyes perpetually under the lash: and, moreover, the students were not detained for a sufficient length of time to complete their education. It requires, according to the testimony of physiologists, at least nine months for the delivery of a good boy ;-now at least nine-tenths of the committals in England are for periods under six months, and hence most of our gaol deliveries must necessarily be mere abortions.

Penal imprisonment for short periods has utterly failed as a means The best test of its of diminishing crime or reforming criminals.

efficiency is the proportion of re-committals; and taking the most accurate returns, those of the Glasgow Bridewell, we find that the re-committals vary inversely as the period of imprisonment for the first

offence.

Out of every hundred condemned to imprisonment for a first offence :

Imprisonment may be expected to repress crime in two ways, either by intimidation or by reformation. Committals for a short period have failed in both ways: they have not intimidated, and it was from the outset impossible that they could reform. Indeed, it may be doubted whether intimidation, as the word is usually understood, has anything M. Lucas, the enlike the efficacy which has been attributed to it. lightened inspector of prisons in France, has shown, from a close analysis of the prison returns in that country, that the prisons which, from want of cleanliness and ventilation, seemed the most noisome, and those which, from the cruelty of the keepers, might be deemed the most detestable, were precisely those to which criminals came back in the greatNor is this fact such an est number, and with the least reluctance. The love of excitement, common to all human anomaly as it seems. beings, is generally excessive in criminals; they prefer even intense suffering to total inaction; and when they cannot apply to the tap, desire that the tap should be applied to them. Ailing is sought as a substitute for ale; and when no other stimulus can be had, they will welcome that of the whipping-post. Physical suffering tends also to gratify another passion, the desire of sympathy. A criminal loves to be pitied ;-it is the passion which still links him to general humanity; and the more severe punishment is preferred to the milder, simply be. cause it excites more compassion. In the same way, most people would prefer a dangerous disease to the toothache, because the pain of the latter is frequently made a jest.