done in the night; that it be perpetrated by two or more men; that the parties are armed; that a house is broken open, or entered under the cover of legal authority; or that arms be either used, or threatened to be used. Under the French code, a seventeenth part of the offences specified were capital. Under the English code, about a seventh were punishable with death. In France, there was no transportation, and about fourfifths of the punishments inflicted consisted of imprisonment and hard labour. In England, the number of transportations were about one-fourth- - the punishments by imprisonment and hard labour amounted also to one-fourth. The mean amount of the English population during the period to which his calculations referred, he would take at 11,000,000. The mean amount of the French population, during the same period, might be estimated at 27,000,000, being about two and a half to one. Such being the number, it appear ed that the convictions in England in the first five years after 1811, were double those which had taken place in France, being five times as many according to the number of the people. In the second series of five years the convictions in England quadrupled those in France, amounting to ten times the number in proportion to the population. In France, the average number of convictions, in the first three years, was 294. The average number in the last three years, 303, being a variation of only nine. In England, the average number at the first-mentioned period was 349. In the latter it had risen to 1,249. This increase, though part of it might be ascribed to the distress under which the

people had groaned and continued to groan, he argued, was also caused in part by the character of our penal code. The situation of

France, twice invaded, the disbanding of a large army, and the horrors of a thirty years' war, would have led them to expect a different result. That France had

escaped the fatal increase of crime which had been witnessed in England, must therefore be ascribed partly to her improved criminal code. In this country, from the year 1805 to the year 1809, which was considered a period of prosperity, when the chancellor of the exchequer was in his Paradise, and, issuing paper, dreamed that it was wealth, the convictions had increased from 339 to 549. As this was before the peace, it could not be ascribed to the pressure of misery under which, he would not deny, the people had since groaned. When two systems produced such opposite effects when under the one crime had decreased, whilst under the other it increased rapidly, there must be in the one something to be approved, and in the other something to be condemned. There was also this striking contrast in the criminal laws of France and Englandthat the former were intended to be carried into effect, while the severe decrees of the other were in most cases dispensed with. This, in itself, was an objection which ought to be fatal to the system. It was a defect opposed to the practice of all civilized nations, opposed to all reason, and justly cordemned by all experience. It was not then too much to infer, that under such a system crime could not be effectually checked nor adequately punished. With respect to the system of police, sir

James Mackintosh observed, that the principal object of police should be to repress disorder; the next, to detect crime. To repress disorder, it would be necessary that more effectual means should be adopted; but he should object to means derived from too great a restriction of human action, which he would call tyranny; and in the detection of crime, he should deprecate as much as possible a system of espionage, by which he believed a nation lost more than it could gain on the score of morality -for such a system was in itself a more fertile source of crime than any other. The most effectual means, in his opinion, for the detection of crime, would be, the mitigation of punishment. If the laws were more mild, no stigma would attach to the discovery of crime: the hearts of men would go with its detection; and we should have that information given voluntarily, and from the best of motives, which was now extorted from the worst of vices. If it were wished to make the informer and the prosecutor appear less odious, let them not conduct to the gallows; let not death to the accused follow the accusation, and we should then have crime discovered, and its punishment approved; instead of, as was now the case, crime studiously concealed, and its punishment looked upon as wanton severity. With respect to transportation as a punishment for crime, he considered it in a variety of cases in which it was at present inflicted, unnecessary and impolitic. There were, however, two classes, to which he thought it applicable. The first was, that of incorrigible offenders, whom no exertions could reclaim. Such persons, undoubtedly, ought to be

banished from the society of which they were unfit members. The next class consisted of persons of a description exactly the reverse. He would suppose the case of a man who had fallen into a crime, of which, perhaps, he might be disposed to repent, but, in consequence of which, there was no hope of his resuming his former place in society. Such a man might be properly sent into a new society, where he might return to those moral practices from which he had fallen. To such persons transportation might be applicable, but then it should be to a colony established on different principles from that of New South Wales.

The Attorney-general declared, that he could not consent to a motion, which cast a censure on the whole of our criminal law; and which was the less necessary, as no specific measure was to be founded upon it immediately. The course which had been pursued by his hon. and learned friend, was truly singular. He had first of all proposed the appointment of a committee to take into examination the whole state of the criminal law. Such a committee was accordingly appointed, and subsequently presented a report, recommending that in particular cases capital punishment should be abolished, and a secondary punishment substituted in its stead. Upon that report certain bills were introduced with a view to carry the recommendation into effect. The house adopted some of these bills, but rejected others; and yet his, honourable and learned friend now said, that the House had, on that occasion, adopted the same principle indirectly, which he called upon it by his resolution to adopt formally at present. The proper

course for his honourable and learned friend to have pursued was this-to have again brought forward those measures, which the report of the committee had recommended, in order that the House might see the remedies which it was intended to apply to the grievances complained of; but instead of doing this, his hon. and learned friend had left the House entirely in the dark as to his intentions, and had confined himself to dark and vague generalities. The ground, continued the attorney-general, on which the present motion was defended, was, that the effect of the criminal law, as it now stood, was to increase the quantity of crime. Now, his hon. and learned friend could have no other grounds on which to rest his assertion, than the number of individuals convicted and executed for any given offence; and if so, the returns of those numbers did not bear him out in the proposition which had been advanced. Besides, his hon. and learned friend was inconsistent in the line of argument which he had himself used. His hon. and learned friend concurred with the statement contained in the report of the committee on the criminal laws namely, that there were some crimes-for instance, burglary, theft, murder, and robbery-to which it was still fitting that the punishment of death should be attached. Now, it so happened, that upon all offences of the nature above specified the punishment of death did not invariably follow; for there were such gradations in the moral guilt of them, that it would be impossible to inflict such punishment upon every instance of them without exception. But

he found, upon inspecting the returns, that the offences he had just named had gone on in the same ratio with the offences mentioned by his hon. and learned friend; and he therefore contended that the argument of his hon. and learned friend, if it applied to the one species of offence, applied with equal strength to the other. It was also a fair inference from his hon. and learned friend's argument, for any person to state, "Your not always applying capital punishment to burglary and murder, leads to an increase of those crimes; and therefore, to diminish the frequency of them, you ought to abolish the capital punishment for them, and to substitute a lighter and secondary punishment in its stead." But his hon. and learned friend was not true to his own principles, for he had declared that he had no wish to abolish the punishment of death in those cases, though he had not given any reason for continuing it in the one case, and discontinuing it in the other. The principle of English law was, not to have a scale of punishment adapted to the exact quantity of crime committed, but to have a known and specific punishment for each species of crime, and to leave that punishment to be mitigated by the crown and the executive government, whenever circumstances seemed to demand or justify lenity. It had been argued by his hon. and learned friend, that where the law affixed death to an offence, but a minor and secondary punishment was usually inflicted in lieu of it, there it would be better to remove the greater punishment entirely, and to continue the less with undeviating constancy. Now, to that