the early ages and the theocracy of the world. In Christianity it finds no countenance. Its long history has been one of carnage and dread accountableness. The millions of the guilty, whom it has doomed alike, though with every shade of guilt, from the lightest to the darkest, the army of the innocent, whom it has cut off in mid-life, imperatively demand the fair and full trial of a more equal, more merciful, more just, and less irrevocable punishment. Imprisonment for life is punishment enough for any one to bear. It may be made terrible, beyond all other. It may be clothed with a fearfulness that shall be more powerful to deter or punish than all tortures and deaths; and this, too, without cruelty. Let it be certain, let it be sudden; let the murderer, the moment he is sentenced, be borne away silently and swiftly from the face of man and the light of heaven, to be consigned for a time to a darkened cell, alone with his conscience and his God, the past and the future, soon, indeed, to leave that intolerable dungeon, but to leave it only for the simple meal or the busy workshop, and then return for the long night, and again rise to the same toil, and again go back to the same loneliness, the same, day after day, for weeks, months, a year, five, ten, twenty, fifty years. Is there a man that can think of this, without a more awful shudder and horror than the fear of death can cause? The only objection is its severity. Yet they who bring that objection say that it will not deter from crime ! It need not be hurtfully severe. We would relieve it of all those aggravations which injure the mind or the body. We would give it all the freedom and social privileges consistent with order and safety. We would surround it with those kind moral influences which are found most effectual in softening the heart and converting the souls of men. Nor have we any of the poor fear, that this very kindness will defeat the object. It will leave enough of the terrible, in the monotonous, unending imprisonment. With all prisoners, kind treatment is as sound policy as it is true humanity. The principle is now demonstrated, and we see it stated in prison reports, that the convicts who are best treated are least likely to return. “Where the greatest severity is practised will be found the greatest number of recommitments." This is human nature, and might have been learned before. Let society treat its offenders severely, they will avenge themselves as soon as they can. Make the laws hard, even seemingly unjust and vindictive, those laws will be again and again broken. Here is one of the causes of the pernicious effects of all capital punishment. Let it be avoided, if there be a change. Let imprisonment be real and enduring, consuming all the active portion of life, or let it be perpetual; but fill it with healthy occupation, with mental and spiritual blessings. Let earth be shut out, but heaven freely come in. Above all, let it be certain. Why can it not be? For no reason but the use and abuse of the pardoning power. That, at the worst, would not be worse than at present. It might be infinitely better. The court that condemns has now the power to order a new trial, if new evidence appears. But this is a mockery, if you kill the man before the evidence can appear. Some of the States, as Vermont and Maine, have recently extended the interval between sentence and execution to a year or more. This is the beginning of mercy, though it seems little more than justice. Why not go on? Allow a longer interval. Let the period before death be five years, ten, forty, a life, where is the danger, either to society or the prisoner, if there be a power lodged solely in the court of ordering another trial, should circumstances in their judgment demand it ? Ay, but the murderer may commit another murder, says one more objector. The prisoner may kill his keeper. This, it has been confidently said, is alone a sufficient reason against the change. Then is it a sufficient reason for hanging the insane man who kills his keeper. If you can protect the state by confinement in the one case, you can in the other. But though you were compelled to punish the repetition of murder with death, it would be no argument for the law as it now stands and works. Besides, most of those who have killed their keepers have been men doomed to die themselves. It is an evil of the present system, and we throw back the objection. Let men live, deal with them mercifully as well as justly, and what motive will they have for violence, what desire to refuse lenity and provoke a severer punishment? Let them live to repent, not to destroy. Let them live to work for society which they have defrauded, or for the families which they have bereft. Then may all the purposes of law and penalty be accomplished; condemnation, confinement, suffering, reparation, and probable reform. Is not the bare possibility of this better than the certainty of the present accumulation of wrongs and evils? are still men; God re- The most depraved and guilty quires that they be treated as men. itself by universal moral education. to prevent crime than to punish it. to prevent; let it not expose and tempt to evil, and then cut off the evil-doer. While it compels men to fight, and honors them in proportion as they kill, it invites the retort of the murderer in England: "I have killed many men to please the king; why should I not kill one to please myself?" Yet more, while those who make murderers are protected by law and upheld by high influence, and the largest number of murderers issue from the licensed dram-shop, what justice is that, or what wisdom, which rewards him who maddened the brain of another until the fatal blow was given, and hangs him who madly and unconsciously gave it? Drunkenness is no apology? No; it is an aggravation. Excuse it not, but punish with some measure of justice. It may be, that many would think it a lighter wrong to themselves and to society, that one of their family be even murdered in his innocence, than that their sons be degraded and lost through the selfishness and depravity of men who go unpunished and unrestrained. Human laws may not be able to reach both offences equally, but they can deal with them more justly. They have no right to give impunity to the one, and visit upon the other the heaviest retributions. -- Let law and religion be supreme. Let the violent and corrupting be restrained, not encouraged, nor destroyed. Let the neglected and corrupted be helped, not left to desperation. Let the ignorant be instructed, and the willing employed, the exposed protected, the fallen raised, and the innocent saved. The guilty must suffer; let them suffer. Let them be surely and justly punished. The murderer especially, the wilful destroyer, the violator of God's holy law and man's sacred life, let him know that he will suffer, -not alone in the tortures of an outraged conscience, but in exile from an outraged community, with time and solitude for busy remorse. Let him suffer, not in vengeance, that is not ours, not for satisfaction, that is impossible, — but for the security of the good, the terror of the wicked, the penitence and regeneration of his own soul. Let God's first mark rest upon him, that none may slay him, but all recognize and reprobate, while they pity and would save. New ART. IV. The Adventures of Daniel Boone. By the WE are sorry to see this little volume. It is taken almost entirely from Mr. Flint's biography of Boone, and contains the same errors, fables, and absurdities. For instance, the hero is said to have been born in 1746, whereas, he was born in 1732; he is said to have died in 1818, although his death really took place in 1820; and at the time of his decease he was, we are told, in his eighty-fourth year, when in reality he was eighty-eight. Nay, the writer of this work has even failed to perceive, that, if born in 1746, he would have been in his seventy-second or seventy-third year if he had died in 1818, and not in his eighty-fourth; he has copied even Mr. Flint's false arithmetic. We find, also, Mr. Flint's fabulous account of Boone's recovery of his daughter, when taken by the Indians in 1776, the falsity of which Mr. Butler exposed years ago; and also the story derived, professedly, from Audubon, which we believe to be equally untrue. Indeed, this volume, throughout, follows Mr. Flint with exquisite fidelity, and, we regret to say, does it, too, without acknowledgment. It is not our purpose, however, to dwell on the work before us, or on any of the other lives or sketches of the hero of this book. We wish, if we can, to shake ourselves free from books, and cities, and the present time, and go with our readers into the grim and green wilderness, and look at the pioneers as they press so boldly, yet cautiously, forward, and build their cabins in the shade of the noble forests which cover the hunting-grounds of the Cherokee and the Shawanese. - The spring of 1769 rose calmly over those broad woodlands. Not a cabin, not a wigwam, lay hidden in those budding valleys; not a white man's foot profaned their ancient silence. Elsewhere there was noise enough. Boston merchants, and Virginia burgesses, and British ministers, all scolding at once about the right of trial in the colonies, and the non-importation of English goods; traders swearing and Indians yelling, from the Ohio to lake Erie. The western slopes of the Alleghanies swarmed with emigrants. On the Wabash and the Illinois, red, white, and mongrel men made the prairies hide ous with their orgies. In the south, and along the Mississippi, the Anglo-Saxons were already crowding the Frenchman and the Spaniard. But in the midst of all this busy life, in the centre of this whirlpool of humanity, lay a virgin land, unknown to the white, uninhabited by the red man, the Dark and Bloody Ground, the hunter's paradise; the home of the buffalo and the elk. Englishmen had sailed up and down the "Belle Rivière" for twenty years; they had built trading stations in the centre of Ohio; they knew the Miami, and the Scioto, and the Maumee by heart; they had formed great companies to colonize the West. peerless forests of that neutral ground, where the Indians of the north and south met to chase the bison together, or to engage in deadly conflict, had been scarce ever entered by the pioneers of the West, the roaming traders. But the The reason is plain enough; there were no dwellers there, none to trade with. Of one band, a dim and shadowy company, and of one only, we hear, as having entered Kentucky before 1769. In 1767, John Finley, with others, we cannot doubt, having crossed the mountains by the Cumberland gap, instead of following the old beaten path of business to the Cherokees and other southern savages, turned northward, along an Indian track known as the Warrior's Road, which led from the Cumberland ford over the broken country lying upon the eastern branches of the Kentucky river, on to the mouth of the Scioto. John was a business man, and saw a good chance for speculation by buying up the Indians' peltries on the spot where they took them; and it seems that he drove a good trade, and was pleased with the country; so that he left, promising himself a speedy return and farther profits. Slowly over that rugged region Finley and his comrades toiled back to Carolina; and the tales they told of the game that filled those new lands buzzed far and wide among the long-legged, fearless hunters that ranged the eastern slope, and the steep valleys of the Appalachian range. Among these hunters was one Daniel Boone, who, with his wife and children, lived in the upper valley of the Yadkin; a man in the prime of life, thirty-six years of age, — for he was born in the same year with Washington, 1732. He was a quiet man, who had known poverty, and after many changes was poor still. A born hunter Daniel was, and fond of nothing but hunting, - a man who preferred to roam the |